The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky Has Turned Black
by Draenog Glas
Summary: Sonic failed college after two years due to a mysterious and sudden personality change. Alcohol is his vice. And despite his failing music career, he has to work a job at a strange coffee shop to help pay for treatments for Tails' leukemia. His mind is constantly warping and changing at a place that has kept vivid secrets, especially with the owner, Shadow. Sonadow, AU.
1. Chapter 1

He sat on the red and black hair in a white and blue hospital, his heart very sick and very heavy, carrying a somber overture for his skin and bones.

His eyes carried a lot of water for his thirsty mouth. He drank his tears often. Thirsty. Drank a vial of tears. It was his vodka. His own form of distilled alcohol.

"I'm telling you though Sonic, he's slowly dying and very little of our efforts from our care has actually helped him at all. Very soon, he might even struggle to speak, but that's because you really can't afford for his care right now, can you Mr. Sonic? I assure you, if you can't afford anything we might have that could cure his illness, then there is nothing we can do, and your so-called son, Mr. Sonic, will die. And we're sorry about that."

_Mr. Sonic…Mr. Sonic…_

He could hear the siren nurses say, as they walked down the white and blue halls.

_Mr. Sonic…Mr. Sonic…_

He gazed up at him with contempt. "It doesn't seem like you're sorry."

The doctor continued to speak with a black and white tone.

"Well, we truly are. He's dying, Sonic, and what can you do to help him? Pay enough cash from your dying music career? Maybe you should get an actual job to help him. You know, anything you can do. Just lounging around thinking of inspiration for the next song that will most likely not become a hit isn't going to make him live any more seconds than us sitting here and talking about his condition. Leukemia is a very serious illness, and…"

"I don't need you to lecture me anymore, doctor," he growled, the words sounding jagged between his teeth. "You have to do something to help him. Anything. I love Tails. He's my only friend here, when everyone else seems to be too busy to even listen to anything I have to say. He's my breath of fresh air in an otherwise fogged and cloudy atmosphere full of smog…"

"But we can't do anything, Mr. Sonic, unless you can pay for the treatments available to him! Hospitals have to keep functioning somehow, and they can't just function on love and tears alone. It's simple for anyone to understand that. Raise some money somehow, or actually get a job. I can't think of any other advice to say to you. And I may seem like a cold, cruel doctor to you, but there's nothing I can fix if I don't have the required tools and the latest medical advancements…they need money to function."

"All this talk about money and you're still not doing anything to save his life…"

The hospital was a ghastly white, as pale as a dead woman's face, while the nurses and doctors passed them by, their heels and shoes and slippers cackalacking throughout the hallways.

_Mr. Sonic…Mr. Sonic…_

The sirens continued to speak. They continued to cry over their forlorn love. The men who didn't love them enough to sleep with them. Their breasts remained lonely. Their tears unshed. Their heart never eaten like an apple from the man's mouth.

Sonic searched through all his photos of Tails in his wallet. Tails playing in the summer, when he was about five, when the flowers were green and yellow and began to bud anew with life, as the sun vibrantly collected long strings of light from the corner of the picture, like children's drawings. He loved the smell of sunshine and rhubarb on those days, but it was beginning to be autumn, where the trees were bare and naked, with their clothes thrown on the ground, red and orange and yellow scarves and dresses and suits collecting on the sidewalks where the rest of the world stomped on them, and the trees didn't mind at all that they were dirty and destroyed now, because they were going to get a new green shade of dapper clothes, right on the first day of spring. They just wanted to be naked in the winter, to embrace the cold, to grab themselves with their long thin stringy arms and shiver with new life for a few months. But the hospital wasn't full of life. He could hear people coughing and breathing out their last goodbyes in the hallways. He could hear the world turning and closing its eyes when the old would fall off the planet as dead sheds of skin, and then the new would come, and the world would be a bright shade of vivid pink again. He wished for a new life as he stood there, staring at the doctor who didn't seem to care at all for his surrogate son, as he suddenly thought of himself as a failure in every corner of his body. He graduated high school a few years ago, but he dropped out of college, expecting that he knew enough about music to get himself by, that he would have a new career all ready for him by the time he turned 26, that he would be successful and rich and would find a sweetheart that he thought he would love for the rest of his life and never mind anything else besides him and his son and the woman who was going to love him.

But none of that ever happened.

_Mr. Sonic…Mr. Sonic…_

He listlessly listened to the nurses' breathy whispers, with their breasts pointed towards his lake green eyes, and he shooed them away. The sirens' call couldn't attract him. They were old hags by the time their men came home. They were old and shriveled, their teeth hanging loose in their sockets, their nails yellow and holed like sponges. They cleaned every area of the hospital without him. He wasn't sure what cleanliness was. Their golden Christ crosses hung loosely around their necks as they talked about salvation for their patients. None of them were going to receive it. They were sick and wicked and Christ didn't love them.

He tried to sell his CDs to all the people that passed him, but no one was interested. He played songs at coffee houses, but everyone could barely keep their eyes open as he sang what song he thought was the best out of everything he wrote and recorded. The music pounded in his head, but he could barely get it out in such a rhythmic way. He could barely get it out in such a way that everyone would stand and listen.

He hated modern radio. They played songs that soon passed their prime after a few days as much as six times a day, and they barely caught his interest. But yet movies and videogames and other such media would play those songs monotonously, and the songs would be captured in his head, and he could barely let them out, and suddenly, he was touched with mediocrity, he was touched with the taint of being a shitty musician who was past its prime with one hit song and the rest were mediocre and bad in everything else. But he kept telling himself that was never going to happen to him. He would be a great musician. He knew everything there was about music. About tone and instruments and what sounded right and what didn't, but yet he never even had one hit song. He was doomed to be insignificant for the rest of his life, a born failure who should've stayed at college and listened to everyone else, who should've stayed in the lifestyle of studying and partying and the hypocrisy and all the things he began to hate about college, the more years he invested in it. And that reminded him: he still hadn't paid for his one or two years. And slowly, he was beginning to climb into debt, climb into the mountains of insanity, and the kicker? His son was dying, and he couldn't afford the proper care for him. He couldn't even afford health insurance, but he tried to make him stay in the hospital anyways, by promising them that he would soon pay them back, even with the clothes on his back if he had to. But he already sold everything that was valuable in his house. He already sold his mother's old golden jewelry and her old glass animals that was maybe worth ten dollars to some people. He even sold one of his TVs, even if he thought he wouldn't get much out of it. He only kept one he got at a garage sale, an old Zenith TV that Tails had to readjust the color every time he wanted to watch his cartoons. And one of the knobs was soon falling off and he would have to get that replaced, or just buy a smaller TV altogether that was only 5 inches wide.

Their bathtub didn't even work anymore. They couldn't hire someone to fix it. So no more baths for a while. Just showers that would be clogged up, with water that had a slight tinge of brown like watercolors. And he knew he couldn't force Tails to live this way. And now God was taking him away. And he thought that maybe, he actually deserved it, for some of the things he did in this life other than drop out of college. He could've done what this doctor thought was right and get an actual job, but he thought he wasn't cut out for minimum wage. He thought that only teenagers and the most desperate artists would have to fall for working for the demon of retail.

But maybe now, he would have to put a backseat to his music career and focus on getting one, or two, or three jobs to pay for Tails' insurance. It was the only thing he could do, with his high school diploma and his few years of college under his belt.

The smell and sounds of death still rang in his nose and ears when he left the white hellhouse. The hellhouse that was containing his son, who could only say a few words to him when he visited. With bags under his eyes, looking swollen and sinking into his skull, with his body thin and scarred from IVs and needles. He was too weak to even say "hello". And even "goodbye".

The pictures from when summer time was around with its green and yellow suits and ties and dresses seemed to tell him of a life he once had that was happy, bright, when Tails was in grade school, when he was in college, getting one step closer to getting a Bachelor's in Music Theory. But he never minded that. His days of college he thought were dismal other than the short bright days of summer. He had no friends. He could barely sleep. He constantly studied but in his other classes other than music he got Cs. His math professor hated him. He could barely write a sentence. And he always slept through his history and social studies. He had those same bags under his eyes while constantly sucking on a diet of simple sandwiches and crackers and of course, the infallible ramen, and teachers would comment on how they could see his bones and rib cage, but he never told them that he knew and he would work on it.

He never did, until he dropped out.

One of his dinners was simply Oreos and Coke. He thought the Oreos would make him gain weight. Same with the Coke instead of the tap water that he thought was beginning to smell like gasoline. Or maybe it was a hallucination. He never knew which anymore.

(They were trying to kill me, he thought. They're making me drink the blood of the land, the blood of Texas and Arabia…)

His fur unkempt, his clothes rumpled and smelling of vomit and alcohol. The drinking. Oh, the drinking. Some nights he drank until his body couldn't take it anymore. Sometimes he went to his lectures drunk or hungover. He could barely keep still in his chair but he tried to keep himself silent, in case they would see, they would hear…

"Mr. Sonic, why are you constantly moving around in your seat? It's distracting to the other students. Stop it."

But the earth was quaking below him! The earth was going to swallow him up like a viper, with its stalactite teeth and with the tongue of red hot lava. The chair would constantly move under him! With its small little padded feet, with the back snickering and laughing and waiting for him to fall on his ass and have the professor yell at him again. But not this time. He wasn't going to fall for its thieving and conniving tricks, the son of a little snot-nosing and cock-eyed…

"Mr. Sonic, I told you to stop that at once! And why are you mumbling under your breath again? Is something wrong with you?"

Something was deeply wrong with him. He was dying.

Dying like how everyone was slowly retching and decaying under the watchful eye of the professor, the killer of souls, the razor of wrists, the pills of the throat, the…

"That's it, Sonic! Out of the lecture and out of this room, now!"

One minute he was clean.

The next he noticed he tore through his sweater and he was gnawing on the wool, while his teeth chattered because it was suddenly cold inside the heated building, and time seemed to be so slow, like each second was slowly melting off the pot like molasses.

His mouth was wet with blood.

He was in the nurses' office, the smell of colds and cough medicine and aspirin that seemed to resonate in his nose, so vividly, even with the small tinge of shit.

"He's been drinking. But I don't think that's really the case…"

"Then what is it? He was disrupting my class, mumbling and chewing through his sweater and all of a sudden he was tearing through his wrists and claiming everyone in the entire building was going to die with great panic in his voice. Isn't that what drunk people act like sometimes? Belligerent drunks?"

"No Mr. Morole, I think it's something…far worse."

Was he really that bad? Did he really chew through his wrists and scream and ache in his head so awfully he thought God was going to crack through his skull?

"Sonic…unfortunately, I leave you no choice but to leave this college and repair your life. I'll send you a referral to a psychologist…"

But he didn't go to one. He thought he was okay. Fine. Normal. His wrists were bandaged, but he thought they were simply cut open by an accident he didn't remember having, maybe when he was drunk. All of it really was because of his drinking. He knew. Because being drunk often had the worst effects on people. Loving husbands became wife beaters. Logical and intelligent people became as stupid as dodos out in the rain. And the quietest people became as loud as lions after they were caged and starved for several days for no discernible reason other than to make them suffer and to see how long a lion could last without food. Then suddenly they were freed and had all the piece of shit humans it could eat, like a disgusting and horrible people buffet where you could watch them rightly suffer as you picked their ribs and lungs and heart to chew and swallow to feed yourself. But did that really made you the better person, just to resort to cannibalism, especially of people who probably ate nothing but hard liquor and canned meat?

He sighed. And shuffled on, through the Buffalo streets.

He lived in a shitty apartment like most shitty people. And ate canned meat and once in a while drank some hard liquor. His favorite was vodka with some schnapps and whatever shit he could find to put in his drink that he considered to be given to an alcoholic. He once mixed vodka, schnapps, Coke, and rum together, and even if it tasted like he was putting his tongue around a garbage can full of tampons and pads and dirty diapers, he drank it anyways. Because that was what desperate people did.

And he checked his answering machine to see if anyone called him. Of course, there was nothing. And he would chug his schnapps and watch TV.

And the TV was shitty too.

But he didn't care. He just needed noise to get through the night. He couldn't stand silence in his apartment. Ever since Tails was in the hospital. Ever since everyone in his life left him.

The night was bright with the radiant stars, glowing just for him, ready for him to blow out all the candles and snuff himself out to silence. But the night was watching him, with his sad little movements, with him wailing the guitar and hearing the whispering and screaming wind pass away without him, as the cars below honked and carried on their business that didn't matter to him at all because he had bigger problems, problems that God couldn't even handle. He sat on the warm mauve couch and tried to count away the seconds and minutes that passed and he nearly drank half the container of his schnapps, his eyes blurry and his stomach heaving with his only meal of Jell-O and chips, as he clutched the couch and wished the world wouldn't melt away from his grasp, because he still had things to do, he had to save Tails, he had to save his music career, and most of all, he had to save himself.

He had to save himself.

Words he thought he never had to say.

He could hear the echo of a dog barking below, of a train steamrolling on the tracks, as the emptiness continued to consume him.

The apartment was a bright piss yellow, with lights that nearly couldn't function anymore, with wallpaper that was cracking and chiseling away with white specks like a broken egg yolk. He smelled cigarettes and beer and sex in the other room a lot. He lit candles sometimes, but they could never burn away the smell. It made it even worse if he got the wrong candle he thought would simply smell like heaven.

But yet he had the skylights. He had the world below him. It used to be such a high class apartment, until he fucked it up, of course.

And he could feel the pressure rising in his throat. The hot acid and bile rushing from his stomach, and he promptly threw up in a trash can, and drained away the taste of vomit with more schnapps.

Everything that was good in his life was wasted away. Like all the money that he wasted paying for his financial aid, for a college he never even graduated in. Like the taste of schnapps in his throat that burned and made his head shake, the pain was coming back to him, but he soon forgot about it, as it all was swallowed and absorbed. Fingers touched the sun of his light, the broken cracked ceiling lamp that shone for all his summer nights when he was wet with sex and drink and firefly spit, and he coughed and wheezed and acknowledged that he was a failure, and he had to deal with it. He had to deal with the fact that he would never have those joyous summers and those joyous days where he thought he had a future back, no, they were gone, like his liquor cabinet now, as he finished the last vial of schnapps.

And like the schnapps that was now completely gone in his life, nothing good was going to happen again. He drank away all his wealth, all his happiness, and he watched the liquor drained away by his tongue, and it happened. Rock bottom. He was a failure, and he would always be a failure. And because of his failures, the good summers were gone, and his surrogate son was going to die, and there was nothing he could do to help him, except work his ass off in menial jobs that would never be enough to pay for his treatment. And he realized that his bank account was in the negatives and he couldn't buy more liquor to escape the pain of his everyday, torturous reminder that he was nothing in this world, and that if it wasn't for Tails, he would just leave this city and leave everything he had and start a new life somewhere far away and change his name and change his personality and maybe even change his appearance so all his loved ones could no longer recognize him as that hedgehog who threw away everything for a risky music career, but got nothing in the end.

He threw away the schnapps bottle in with his vomit. And he tried to keep himself from crying. He held himself as he sat on the coach, trying to focus on his sitcoms, but nothing was ever going to make him laugh, as long as he had this life, that he wished he could shed like a snake and have brand new fur and skin. The droning laughter rang in his head and began to taunt him, the police checking on him through the windows, the spiders that were flowing through the cracks of his apartment in black tiny spurts like blood, he wanted to end everything, and he wished he chewed his wrists a little bit more and killed himself right in that classroom and left the cold dead world and he would become cold and dead himself.

The world crackled like fire now. It burned and singed his fingers and his eyes. Feeling, he decried, feeling! Feeling the flames blackening and warping his body, he could feel the demons eating upon his flesh, the world of Hell living on his misery. He knew he wasn't crazy. He knew he was just a strange hedgehog but not a crazy hedgehog that heard things and got strange ideas about the world and had his mind bleeding once in a while in a river of madness, that led to Styx and the underworld of Hades.

He looked at his magazines. None of them were particularly interesting. He just collected old magazines on the streets for collages he did once in a while as a passing hobby. He always found magazines with a lot of flowers and furniture and old ladies smiling back at you warmly while doing their crocheting by the fire, magazines that he thought were simply women things but he couldn't waste it, as any magazine was a thousand opportunities to make a new collage art, but he only managed to cut out another woman and tear out her eyes with needles and glue them both on a piece of painted cardboard, called "Peer Pressure". He thought it was clever, but no one else seemed to care.

But flipping through one of the magazines in a drunken stupor, just wanting to gaze at more vivid colors than his TV that sometimes highlighted everyone with a bright green marker, he managed to find an advertisement that interested him. Something that just poked through his mind more than the needles in his collage piece.

**_MEN AND WOMEN WHO HAVE A PENCHANT FOR CREATIVITY AND AN ABUNDANT OVERFLOWING RIVER OF IDEAS WANTED!_**

**If you think you fit the description…**

**Come to Shadow Grounds Coffee House and Mocha Lounge!**

_Have people described you as the creative type? Artsy fartsy? An emotional quivering ball of emotions? And you like the arts, such as music, painting, fashion design, interior decorating and anything else that you think might tickle my fancy? Come to Shadow Grounds Coffee House and Mocha Lounge for an interview, and we'll decide if you're creative enough to enter our team! We need several directors, one who truly knows what he/she is talking about, to design the lounge and the team's uniforms and even the music that is chosen to play in our speakers. Must be at least 18 or older, have a college degree or have entered college for a few years, good-looking (we're not going for drop dead gorgeous, but we're not exactly looking for someone who can't take care of their appearance either), good with people, and of course, has the same penchant for coffee like their penchant for creativity and the arts (because if you didn't like coffee at all, then what are you doing in a coffee shop, when the smell of coffee is always in the air and it makes you want to vomit day after day of entering our building while you have to listen to some stupid ass hipsters recite their lame and boring poetry? Then you wouldn't like this job, and trust me, we can't stand hiring someone who isn't going to like his job). If interested, just walk right in and ask for Mr. Shadow. Be forewarned, Mr. Shadow fully analyzes his clients and sees if they will truly be fit for the job, so don't come calling us on the phone and complaining you didn't get the job because Mr. So-and-So doesn't know jackshit about art. Well, did you know there might be other factors too? Maybe he's better with people than you. More good-looking. Smart. Polite. If you're considered for the job, Mr. Shadow will call YOU. Don't call us asking if you got it. Mr. Shadow will let you know. If you don't get anything, then enjoy your unemployment like the rest of 20% of America. If you don't want the recession to bite you in the ass and you aren't creative with a single damn thing, don't bother. Shadow Grounds Coffee House and Mocha Lounge is located in West Hildegas Rd., near some other ma and pa shop that can't afford to keep in business. You know the ones. These monopolized American corporations like Starbucks is taking over, and maybe we're next, and that's why we need you. Apply today._

The advertisement didn't fit in at all with the rest of the magazine, with the flowers and the cutesy children treats and the smiling old ladies and the one secret to lose weight that all of America didn't want to tell you about, as if all skinny-thin women needed to eat more salads and run more miles.

A coffee shop that was actually hiring, who wasn't going to accept pretty girls and pretty boys who just came out of high school. And even if it didn't tell him how much the employee would get paid, he thought maybe it was a little more than a menial job. And all he had to do was make decisions and be creative! He could certainly do that! Even if his creativity was as dull as a brown-tinged razor that scraped and cut baby smooth skin like the asshole it was.

Sonic circled the advertisement in jagged, thick black lines with his Sharpie, and tried to remember the name in his drunken mind. Shadow Grounds Coffee House and Mocha Lounge…it sounded like a small-time coffee shop, like the many he saw around his city, but this one seemed to have more…character. More mystique hidden in its black Helvetica typefont.

They said if he entered a few years of college he could be qualified for the job. And he thought he was creative. People described him as good-looking. He was very good with people. Charming. Maybe this would be his dream job. Maybe working minimum wage at this place wouldn't be too bad. And he liked coffee too. Not enough to drink gallons of it like some people did, but he liked it enough to have a cup or two in the morning.

And he could start maybe as early as tomorrow.

And for the first time in a long while, he smiled big and wide. Even with all the schnapps and beer in his system who reminded him that he was constantly trying to get away from ache and misery.

He sloppily tore out the page, with long strands of it sticking out like jagged teeth, and pinned it to his wall with the chipped and decaying paint, as he sung what he thought would be his new hit song, and thought…maybe, Tails would soon be alive after all.

His happy smiling surrogate son who used to play so happily and joyously in the summer backyard, would return to his life again.

And maybe he could pay his debt too, and be a functional normal hedgehog. Maybe not with a hit song, but a paying job like the rest of America. And maybe he could even reenter college too, and pick his life back up, the fragile glass pieces that shattered a long time ago to make a beautiful, Mosaic art piece that the world would forever admire.

But his eyes gazed back at the quivering festering piece of bloodied flesh that was rotting away in the corner.

If only the demons that rested in the black hole of the corner of his apartment would stay where they were, their bare teeth flashing like knives, ready to eat and tear through his fragile little brain again.

He would have to keep them at bay. Maybe with alcohol. Maybe with the few pills of vicodin he kept in a little orange bottle in the cabinet.

Maybe God would look out for him, but even with all this pain staining his body, he wasn't so sure if he was keeping his eyes on him anymore. He was looking away, looking at all the pretty people, down below his apartment, gazing up at him, looking at all the horrific and disfigured hedgehogs.

He went downstairs to buy more alcohol. The night was too lonely without it.


	2. Chapter 2

_I am a writer. And like most writers, writing is just another form of breathing to me. Breathing fresh air that gives life to their heart. It makes it beat vibrantly, with vitality, with more appreciation for the air I have been breathing in my lungs, the trees inside me that give me more life and more reasons to live throughout my sorrows, my happiness, my pain, my empathy through all the people in this world. But since I couldn't breathe as deeply and as lovingly as I used to, I have grown cold and sad, like a stone in the bottom of an ocean, never seeing yet another face. Nothing but fishes that swim past it, ignoring that it has sat there for many a millenia, hearing the ocean's thrummings and the blue hands that have reached out for the other life past the surface. The rock can see how high the ocean's sky is, with its iridescent clouds lit up like white flames above a world that it could never imagine. And now, something inside me has carved out that stone heart, and I hoped the heart is brand new, and gold, before it rusted away and solidified due to the hate inside me. Hate that has left me bitter, waiting for someone to tame that wild heart that is green with the dirty oxygen, the dirty hate I've been breathing in with the writing, with the heartbeats and the blown up trees inside my lungs. And now I hope that heart will resonate inside me, to know of the love that was once in the world, the world that I used to know, before I grew used to pain and pity, and it made me forget of the strength inside of me, the strength that used to keep me alive through all the terrible things that tried to freeze my heart and make it no longer beat. The stone cut knife like my eyes, the sharp blade that I could use to end my life, I don't want that anymore. I don't want to feel the pain and the so-called rapture of death. Here, trying to breathe again, even if it seems more and more I am suffocating, it is the only thing that will make my heart vibrant and plump like a peach, red and gold, with the lungs with the trees not with leaves that I soon want to get rid of that are yellow and decayed, but green and swaying in my oxygen._

_I want this and more._

_I want someone to show me what love is again._

_I want someone to show me that life is worth living for._

_I want someone to show me that my heart can be loving and glowing again._

_But I am here, in this dank cold coffee shop, waiting for someone to hopefully answer my ad. Not many people who just graduated from college, with a firm idea of what they want to do, would want to come here. They would rather do their paralegal or their writing or their art or what have you. They would rather ignore my pleas for help, as this coffee shop is nearly out of business, and I really can't take anyone else here. I don't want teenagers who would soon quit once school rolls back around. I want someone long-term. Someone who can…promise me that they will stay here, no matter what._

_If I can find someone like that, who will stay with me, who will teach me that life isn't always fraught with pain and sorrow and madness, then maybe I will stay here too._

_And so will my heart._

He sighed as he scoot away from his computer desk, reading everything. He felt that everything he wrote was useless. Nothing but junk. Bulk that couldn't be used in exchange for pleasure in people's minds, vivid images, and appreciation in other people's souls, but he never minded and just saved it without a second thought.

The smells of coffee had died down. It was about closing time for the shop. He thought his employees usually just chatted away the night without paying attention to their customers or him, and they were excited just to get out of the shop and just relax the whole weekend, even if they didn't do much of anything. That was how it always was. They never seemed to even give him a notice, except when he reprimanded them or threatened to fire them if they didn't do this, and he thought he wasn't always a bad person. Just everyone else was making him be a bad person.

But as the night grew larger and lonelier, as the stars have poked through the sky and shined so bright late that night, as he turned over the sign that once said OPEN and now it was becoming CLOSED with its large orange florescent letters, he hoped maybe tomorrow would be different. That maybe people responded to his ad. That people were willing to work in a coffeeshop that was open from 10 in the morning to 1 when the sky was pink and tender like a black medium well steak. But he could do nothing at all to quicken his wait, except that before he would go back to his home to sleep before he would return to his Arabic beans smelling lair, he would watch the sun rise. He would watch the rosy-cheeked face of God before he would return home, as he always believed that God had two forms to watch over the world: the sun and the moon, the sun changing color on his moods, and the moon being cut and sliced when he wished to have both pair of eyes to see the sins and the debauchery.

He sighed again, and so did the wind. And so did his lighter, as it lit up his cigarette and he sat, smoking the white cancer stick, watching as the world was birthed with light, as the darkness began to recede back to the corners of the far Earth.

_God, please give me someone who will love me as much as you love others, as much as the light loves the Earth._

_And make it good, like when you gave birth to Eden._

—

His head felt like it was pinned against needles, that his brain was letting out a stream of blood from his ears.

His eyes felt like they were going to fall out of his sockets at any time.

His body ached, his mind ached for the ibuprofen to get rid of his godawful headache.

Sometimes he wondered if the only way to get rid of this pain throbbing inside his head was to put a bullet in his head.

His mind focused on the pain, but he knew that today he had to apply for a job, a job that promised him better pay, that promised him to help his son, that promised more alcohol and pills.

Could he show up to work drunk?

If he was respected enough, he would. He would drink beer and vodka and rum all day and get away with it. It was much better tasting than coffee. Maybe he should've worked at a bar instead. Maybe he should've worked where he got plenty of alcohol, not constant bitter tasting crap he had to drink in the morning just to stay up and get through the day.

But he had to have coffee, just to get himself awake during the day. He turned on his coffee machine and ordered it to brew two cups. Two cups was all he could handle.

And he had to put a lot of sugar and creamer in it of course.

And he sat near the counter, with the coffee cup curled in his hands, wondering again on all the things that went wrong, how his apartment used to been so nice and tidy and now was a pigsty, full of his artwork that he could never finish and the small TV and the wallpaper with splintered paint and the toilet that couldn't get rid of all the shit and piss that he had to flush twice and the bathtub that couldn't be a bathtub anymore but a shower with brown cold water that looked like it came from the sewers.

It used to be a nice apartment, but all he did was simply live. Simply continued on with his drinking and his laziness to fix anything and his persistence that the apartment didn't need fixing and all was fine, but now he thought that once he got a better pay than being a failing musician he would get a nice small house to take care of Tails in and give him a nice place to go to school and maybe drink wine instead of vodka and rum. But he possibly wasn't being paid that much. He knew he never would be. He knew he was probably going to get fired the first few days. Just collect his paycheck and go he said to himself. And drink, drink, drink. He knew he couldn't stop. Alcohol was the only thing that numbed the bad spirits inside him. The spirits that ran in his blood and told him they had to be let out, to be free with the wounds he was constantly given.

Bump his head on the table in a drunken stupor. There goes a few of those spirits. Dripping down in a glorious red cascade of blood that shined in the light, that looked nearly black without it. The spirits were evil. They were the reason the blood was black.

They constantly told him to do things.

Like burning down the entire apartment.

Crashing his car into a tree, which he knew was bound to happen any day now.

Letting those evil spirits flow down in that waterfall, letting them out so he wouldn't get the evil thoughts anymore.

They even begged to be let out sometimes. That they hated Sonic's body. That they wished he wouldn't have one and just be a spirit where no one could see how disgusting he looked with his bloodshot eyes and his quills that looked raggedy and no longer with the sheen of bright jewels.

And he thought he hated it too.

Did he have to go to the job interview wearing a suit and tie? He hoped not. This was just a coffeeshop after all. He didn't need that fancy shit just to make himself acceptable to people. He could go on looking like this, with his hangover, with his four hours of sleep, his eyes red with rust.

He didn't had a suit anyways. Who needed them? They were simply made up by corporate fascists. They were made up by assholes who thought lying about who you really were would make you acceptable to people.

He drank his two cups of coffee, put the keys in the ignition, realized his car was a piece of shit too and maybe if he got enough money from the job he would get a nice one of those too, and he followed the directions to the Shadow Lounge Coffee House and Polka Found, whatever the hell it was called. And his car sputtered, it coughed and wheezed and sneezed, and he drove through the traffic just to get to his newfound job.

Dawn was over. It was nearly the afternoon, as Shadow flipped the sign from CLOSED to OPEN, the florescent orange letters inviting people in. And his workers were inside, chatting. They always were. Of course. They probably didn't care that they would have customers soon. They probably didn't care that he wanted them to tell him when a new client who was willing to take the job would come in and accept his offer. They could use a real, bright genius to make the coffeeshop a nice place to be, a place where people from all over went to. A place where the decor was nice, the pictures actually matched and not their random photos of famous baseball players and John Lennon, the bathroom that had pictures Marilyn Monroe in the women's and his workers having some confusion to put in pictures of Marilyn Manson in the men's…

The shop was confusing, a little cheap in its style, and customers even complained that the coffee tasted bad and cheap, like the rest of the shop. And Shadow remembered as the smell of the beans being roasted and the coffee streaming inside the brown mocha-colored halls that he actually hated coffee, and he wasn't even sure why he started a coffeeshop in the first place. It was simply because it was passed down from his father, who used to drink gallons of coffee everyday. He would drink three cups in the morning, then three cups at night. It was possibly why he had heart problems and later developed sudden shocks in his legs and hands. Because he drank too many cappuccinos that it made his heart stop, as if all the chocolate and caffeine made it turn to a sudden steaming knife and it was plunged into his chest.

And sometimes he thought that he hated his father, simply because he thought he couldn't run a coffeeshop set in the present and not the 1980's, back when maybe college kids cared about baseball players or Marilyn Monroe. And as for why he never got rid of the Marilyn Manson pictures in the next bathroom, he wasn't even sure why. He simply thought the rest of the shop looked bad, why try to fix it? So maybe the legacy of his father could burn down in the ground and he could have the real job he always wanted: a taxidermist. He studied stuffing animals for years, but yet his father in his last dying words with the cappuccino knife stuck to his heart, told him that he had to work here, and make sure it becomes a thriving business. And Shadow knew he couldn't keep it hip and trendy by himself. He needed employees who would help him, not these ungrateful brats who came here and just wanted to talk about summer movies and what was going to happen next in their shitty high school that never taught them anything or even had one decent person come out of it. He sighed, as he moved in deeper to the halls as the mocha lounge became as black as coffee without sugar or cream, he simply said to himself that even if the business was pulled down to the bowels of Hell like it should've years ago, it wouldn't be a problem. Except that he actually respected his father, even a little bit. Even a small amount for his cappuccino drinking days and his constant worrying over his shop, as if it was the only thing he had in his life.

And he remembered that it was. His father never had much in his life. Just his children. His wife who soon left suddenly. And abusive parents who constantly told him he would amount to nothing, and he told himself that he would never treat his children that way, that he would make sure he would never be like them, the parents who truly amounted to nothing, as they drank constantly and soon totaled their vehicles back in '83.

His father became an alcoholic one day too, until he switched the rum and whiskey to coffee and cappuccino. So in a way, he never stopped drinking. And his drinking soon killed him in the end.

The coffeeshop's clocks seemed to drone on, with their ticking and twanging and clicking and clacking. He tipped and tapped his fingers on the desks. He sniffed and snorted and sighed and sorted. He looked outside, with the grass a bare yellow, as if he was staring into miles of desert, as the sun continued to sap the world of moisture, the drought that soon passed on from Africa to Buffalo, New York. The city continued to shiffle and shuffle, and the people continued to talk and balk, and the horns honked and horked, and he thought maybe he should've never lived in Buffalo in the first place. He should've lived in a small state with right-wingers, like Indiana or Tennessee or Arkansas. Because he would rather live in a place where he knew that he was smarter than everyone else, that he was the most intelligent goddamn person in the whole damn state, than a place that was full of people who claimed to be artists or writers or actors and they would always make more money than him, no matter how phony they were, no matter how much of a sack of shit they really were.

His hands shook even if inside of the mocha lounge felt like ninety degree weather, as he fumbled around for his cigarettes, as the clocks continued to count down the seconds and his employees continued to talk and chatter away their dismal lives. The cigarette dangled from his mouth and he fumbled around for a lighter as he sweat and stared outside the sun-stroked world, until he heard someone shout in the ambivalence, "I looked in the ads yesterday and was told that I could get a job here. Where's Mr. Shadow? Is he supposed to interview me?"

_Shit. Someone is here already. Hopefully he's good. Hopefully he has the vision to make this lounge bright._

With the cigarette still hooked into his mouth, he ran down the black and brown halls and went into the main room, seeing a blue hedgehog, with blood-soaked eyes and hair that looked barely brushed and without a suit and tie on his torso, asking for a job, with the employees, understandably, trying to refuse him and forcing him to go back to his shithole home.

The hedgehog looked like a wreck. He looked as if he only got a few hours of sleep each night, and he constantly worried about everything that his skin prickled with sweat and his heart constantly drummed and stabbed through his body. He felt sorry for the poor bastard, but he wasn't sure if he could hire someone like that to the job, especially if he was looking for a professional, someone who really knew how to design and how to run a business.

"Go back home, seriously! Go back home and take a damn shower! And get some fucking sleep while you're at it! What do you think we are, a crack house?" The gray rabbit howled, as he tried to make the blue hedgehog give up and maybe find a real job he was good at: the crackhouse. Hedgehogs like him were simply wastes, simply pieces of shit that might as well have been homeless, looking to get into a job that was as high-end as Shadow's Mocha Lounge, a place that Shadow tried to keep everything in order, tried to make sure everything was professional, with its pictures of baseball players and Marilyn Monroe and Manson…

Who the hell was these piece of shit employees trying to kid themselves?

"Hey! Don't try to kick him out when he simply wants a chance at getting a job like everyone else. You think we're high-end, Stone? Look at us. We play the Bee-Gees and Michael Bolton 24/7 on the coffeeshop's radio, we have pictures of Marilyn Manson in the men's restroom, and who the hell cares about the Cubs anymore when they've been losing for a hundred fucking years? You know true artists look like they're homeless. And I need all the damn help I can get. What's your name, blue hedgehog?"

The employees sighed as they let go of Sonic, his heart heaving in his chest as he thought that maybe he wouldn't be able to get this job after all, and even if he did, everyone here would hate him, everyone here would wish he was dead and gone and that he got fired and he never had to work a day in his life again because he was such an asshole because his heart beat wrong and his eyes blinked too many times and he breathed in too much air…

"I said, what's your name?"

The question continued to echo in his ears. But sometimes he wasn't even sure what his name was either. No one had names. They were simply too simple. People were remembered for their actions, not what name they were chosen to be with…

"Uh…Sonic. Hi. I read an ad in your paper and you said you wanted me to be…"

"What do you do in your spare time?"

"Huh?"

"What do you do in your spare time?" He nearly roared in his eardrums.

His heart was beating faster. Faster than the second hands in their coffeeshop that seemed to grin so widely and the numbers seemed to stare at him with disdain and hate…

"I uh…I make music. I'm trying to get ahead as a recording artist, and I also do collages once in a while…"

"Good. Good enough for me. Have you been to college? Or are you just a high school student like these assholes?"

Something seemed to set this "Mr. Shadow" off. Whether it was his employees or his…appearance. Or the fact that no one seemed to answer their ads and all they got was a pathetic wino like him.

"No, I actually graduated high school and I went to New York State University for a couple years, and then…"

"Good! You're hired! You start first thing in the morning! Or you can even start right now if you want! No one answers my ads anyways so why don't you start helping us right now?"

Sonic stood, dumbstruck, as he replied to Shadow that he admitted he looked like a mess. That he came in here without a good shower or a suit and tie or anything that would make him look "professional". Shadow simply shook his head, as he went back in the dark hallways and tossed a hairbrush and what seemed to be a black and white suit.

Sonic thought for a moment as he held the suit that he would look desirable on a job, that people would smile when they saw him and that people would see him as a hard-working employee of America like the rest of Buffalo, New York, until he noticed at the front of the suit was…frills.

White, fluffy frills, with a nice white fluffy cap to go with it.

This wasn't a suit, he realized to himself.

He unfolded it, seeing the "suit" in all its glory. A black and white maid's dress, with an apron at the front and a long, white silky ribbon at the back.

Was Shadow simply kidding with him, or did he really wanted him to…wear this?

"Hey, Mr. Shadow, what you gave me wasn't a suit, it was a…"

He couldn't see him, but he could hear his voice echoing in the halls, as the employees behind him began to snicker and break out into gushes of laughter.

"That was the only thing left in the employee closet. I could try to find you another suit, but if you want to look as nice as possible, then you're better off wearing that, no matter how ridiculous you look."

_Was he serious?_

His fists shook and his eyes wavered and he began to breathe out hollowly, as he stared at the laughing employees, who thought that this new worker of theirs, the new sack of meat, the new piece of shit to join them, was going to be as humiliated as possible, and that today was going to be a good day.

"Alright, enough assholes!" he shouted. "I'll put the damn thing on and I'll try to be a good employee. If you don't can it I'm going to…"

"Don't threaten the others, Sonic. Just wear it for a few hours and see how it goes, Christ almighty!"

He could hint the annoyance in Shadow's voice.

Well, he was given a job here. He was given possibly enough money to pay for his son's hospital bill. To give him more life-saving medicines. He might as well put on the maid's dress with a smile and just deal with it with how many hours he was stuck in this shithole that graced him with a nice job and a nice opportunity to turn his life around.

And with the employee's snickering behind his back, he blushed a florescent red, and they could even see the tips of his ears changing to a bright orange, as he put on the dress and the maid's cap and the maid's shoes, his face turning a more vivid tinge of pink the more he delved into wearing it, that he wished the employees would simply disappear and let him go on with his embarrassment. He didn't need to hear laughing to remind himself of how he had sunk so low to wearing women clothes just to support his son through his illness.

He might as well have went to a Chippendale's and stripped. But as he thought it over, maybe he was better off just wearing a dress. He couldn't imagine about a hundred or so women screeching and cheering and hollering whenever he flashed himself. He thought that was an even worse scenario to go through, that was, if people didn't want to make him a laughingstock of the entire shop, including the customers.

"Hey, looking pretty today, are you Sonic? Might as well put on some lipstick and put a pair of oranges in your dress too, huh sweetie?" And they jostled with laughter, as he simply walked away from the group, staring outside of the shop, looking beyond the sun-drenched grass and his reflection, his glassy brightened red cheeks so prominent, that he simply ignored the other employee's chatter. He stared at the cars that were passing by the shop, ignoring the smell of coffee in the air and that it was about 11 AM in the morning, a nice time to get a cup of coffee or two.

Sonic thought he didn't want a coffee in his system, but that he would rather have a beer. Or two. Or three. Four even.

And as time went by, the minutes, the seconds, even an hour, no one went into the shop. No one wanted to bother coming in. He was stuck here, wearing a dress, being the joke of the entire staff, without Shadow stepping in to defend him, whatever he was doing in his office. Whatever he thought was a good idea to do while no customers wanted to come in.

He sat, waited, and sighed. Another 20 minutes passed, and he even went up to the bar and ordered a coffee, with the rest of them laughing and cracking snide remarks. But the blushing began to reside, and he ignored them. He thought that maybe it was better wearing a dress than a stuffy suit and tie. It was certainly making a statement to The Man, who said that he couldn't afford health insurance and that he couldn't attend college anymore and that he needed to see a psychiatrist. He didn't want any of that. He simply wanted to be free, be himself, with his son, watching the sun sinking and the sky turning black with the glittering array of stars and the fireflies that wanted to be the stars of the earth. And he still missed those summer days he spent with Tails. He still missed the days he spent when he was happy for once in his life, not with the grips of alcohol, not with the whine and dirge of the voices inside his head, with one saying that he wasn't good enough, another saying he was a bad person, another saying that he was a good person, he just had to get stronger, and he just imagined all these voices inside his head living in a shitty apartment like his, with the cracked linoleum and the smell of cigarettes and beers stinging everyone's nostrils in the air, with the crying of children and the demand of vodka and rum stringed in the air, with the doors slashed open with knives, with the voices trying to get as much peace and quiet they could as they lived inside this asshole's brain, and they gazed outside the window and watched his actions, hoping that someday, they could be what they all wanted to be.

Dead.

He took a sip of espresso to his lips, as he remembered that dark, terrible night.


	3. Chapter 3

The voices spoke.

_Is he going to die?_

_Is he really a real hedgehog? Or is he artificial like the rest of society?_

_Is he alive?_

_Or is he dead?_

_Look at him pandering to the Man of society, see him walk and talk like the rest of the phonies…_

_Shit eater!_

_You're so worthless!_

_You should jump out of the car! Jump, jump!_

_Mommy, is he going to be okay?_

_Ring ring!_

_Telephone!_

_Telephone for our lucky maiden, Annabelle!_

_Hear her talk about her dead baby that curled up and rotted inside this boy._

_I'm dying, dying!_

_Go kill yourself, you piece of shit!_

His eyes contained the still images of red lights, stopping in the middle of the dark, bloody, and infinitesimal night that seemed to reach on for many years, thousands, millions. He was in the middle of the galaxy, as his mother bandaged a cigarette to her mouth, her breasts flat and androgynous, her quills dull and never glaring in the green light. That meant go.

Her lips appeared bloody, containing meat she ate just this morning. The sky was bleeding a rough pink against the sky, a silhouette of a finger. The mother's nails, they were wooden, iridescent against the gold lights that told her to slow down, turning to the burning red that caused her to growl and stop.

Sonic's bed was full of beer bottles, from many different brands. Budweiser, Corona, Rolling Rock, Miller Light…always had the wide selection of taste, she did. The mother who was a monster. Her fur so hairy, quilly legs so skinny and small like the cigarettes that clung to her like the bandages on her breasts, she was a sick mother, a mother who wanted to love, but couldn't, and Sonic never learned how to scream. His mother took away his voice years ago. She stored it in a little brown box with a golden key. Never allowed to speak to the mother. Never allowed to speak to the children either. Or his father, who was away on business trips.

The voices were his voice, that was inside his brain, their lips sinking deeper, deeper, into his gray matter…

_Stupid little bitch! _They screamed.

Her glasses always seemed to fall off the bridge of her nose. Her lip always bloodies it. Dangling off her mouth, the glistening white teeth, she asks questions, Sonic never answers.

The drive took hours. Sonic wanted to go to sleep and never hear his mother talk again.

She encouraged him to believe in the supernatural. That voices are charms inside a man's poultice soul, that fingers are parts of tree branches God made to build humans with sticks and stones, the flesh was kissed by witches, the sex organs are the aftereffect of Adam and Eve. Religious, religious! She was very! Sonic's lids began to drop as he heard her speak about how men don't seem to appreciate her enough, and the bloodlips, they were becoming more odious the more Sonic gazed at them. He imagined roses growing from them, while her eyelashes were petals.

The voices wanted to kill her, but he could never let them. She was an oracle.

They lived in their father's SUV while he was gone. Because they couldn't stand being in the house alone at night.

She traveled to many states while his mother had insomnia.

Tennessee? Been there.

Oregon? Been there.

California? Yes.

Mexico? Maybe. He couldn't remember.

Or was that Texas…

Oklahoma? What a shitty state!

Ohio? The only color Ohio is is gray and white!

Florida? A hurricane happened there and they somehow survived.

Massachusetts? Maybe his only favorite state.

They could've been everywhere except Hawaii and Alaska.

His mother wished her car was a boat too, to travel to Europe, to Asia, Australia, anywhere but the US.

He wished he could travel anywhere but here, but he remained locked in the van, by her mother's long thin fingernails that hid the keys in their individual lock on her painted beauties, as red as her lips. How bloody they were! Full of poppies in her lips, full of disdain!

Sonic continued to whisper, the words insurmountable in their volume, touching his fingers, wondering if they had locks. His green eyes, and his mother's, glittered like the pavement in the street, gold and jade, the colors that would take him to Oz. Or was it the Yellow Brick Road? He sighed as the raindrops littered his screen, and he watched his mother smoke cigarette after cigarette in the cold night with the white spiked moon that continued to shine ever so brighter with his mother's melancholy, her lows ambivalent in her gaze, her hair that was dry and crusted and flaked, her arms lavendered with cuts and scars, her alcohol level twice the legal limit, but she still drove like any sane man would. God bless her, God bless my mother, he said.

_You shall never speak an inch of me._

_You shall never say my name._

_You shall never drink mommy's drink._

_You shall never eat mommy's flesh (my dinner. You get food yourself.)_

_You shall never speak of daddy when he's gone._

_You shall never ask questions when mommy's out making money so she can eat and drink._

_You entertain yourself. You stay quiet at the back of the car. Let me earn a few dollars for gas money._

He watched them have sex in the car, a man he never known, her mother naked with offensive breasts that protruded out of her bandages and her vagina even worse (he imagined it was so dirty that flowers began to rise from her dirt and filth, in a way to disguise her heinousness), and he felt he couldn't see either. He backed away as the seats jumped, bounced, their gyrating bodies hovering over him, their sweat and semen and juices dripping on his quiet head, his mouth that could never speak any words to the incident that his mother was selling her body just to buy gas and beer and cigarettes, once in a while food. His mother often ate very little except fried food in gas stations and little trinkets of sacks of Cheeto's and Dorito's and pork rinds. Sonic just ate whatever was left, which meant he often went without food for days.

To this day, as he remembered his mother, having sex with mysterious men, driving away from their lonely home that his father paid for, living in the van and sleeping with yellowed cushions as his only friend, his back sprained from the effort of trying to find a comfortable position next to all the moon-lighted beer bottles.

Drank dirty water to stay hydrated. Or several of what was left of her beer's. Sometimes she left some gin ready to be drank with thirsty throats and eager vivacity. He soon grew to love alcohol. It kept him away from the reality of the men. Pointing their fingers at the little child that watched them fuck senselessly, that the man would joke and pay her extra if he could fuck his mouth.

_Please don't, mother please don't mother please don't please don't…_

He shut his eyes, winced tightly, but nothing came about. His mother told the man to get out of the van and he couldn't fuck her an inch more of his dick. Told him to take his money and shove it up his ass. His mother, the colorful linguist, yet he still wanted to remain blind for the rest of his life. It took away all the scary things, all the men with cat dicks, all the men who wished to have sex with him too.

"Fucking pedophiles! Sick!" She took another swig of whiskey as she dressed up and put the key in the ignition. They were on the road again, and she laughed it off. Sonic wouldn't care if anyone fucked him or not, she said.

Wasn't about him, he repeated. It was status. She didn't want pedophiles taking her blood mixed in with their life. She didn't want them to even stain her and scar her like so many of these other men did. The pedophiles were at the very lowest of her rank, next to rapists.

She was raped a few times. He remembered. He feared he was next, as he lied in the back of the van, holding onto a vodka bottle, drinking whatever he could to forget about the incident entirely.

Nights grew darker. The rain became more celestial, showing more glitters of the street. Green meant go. Yellow meant slow down. Red meant stop. The cigarette was like a fingernail that was oxidized and rusted brown in her mouth, the red beginning to burn away the remnants they had that was once redeemable. Her ashy mouth sucked all of the cigarette until, like a snake, she swallowed her cigarette whole.

A hallucination, he felt. Unless his mother didn't have the money to eat and she was hungry to eat her relics she kept dangling in her car like tourmalines and diamonds, the cases of beer and whiskey and gin lined up, glittering like stars in the night sky, while Sonic had his voice taken from him in a glass jar, his mother inserting holes, the firefly ready to come out. Flames, flames! The fireflies were truly dragons ready to burn down their lives!

Did she have the lock to the box? Or the jar that contained his voice?

He knew she didn't even have it. He kept it away from himself. For his own safety.

The lady, stick-thin, a caricature, her lips like poppies with their black holes, her bitchlids always propped open. The breasts were veined like a nice delicate white cheddar cheese, the blue wine flowing through it.

Sonic's only survival was to drink. Drink away from the pain of the bitch.

He could catch the darkness in his hands. How black, how bloody they seemed to be! His eyes caught onto the stars, the signs made by the streets, and he wished to sleep, as more men came in, waking him with their pendulums swinging against their bodies, their pubics as hairy as his mother. Wanted to take that away, and he caught a dangling cigarette as the voices told him to smoke it, and become part of the majority, like mommy, like her selfless breasts that poked through her shirt when she was ready to prostitute herself, when she believed the bandages didn't make her pure, ready for any man to take her away to Eden.

He triggered the lighter to spark a small flame, and he burnt the cigarette. And he coughed and hacked without a sound, and he let it burn in the back seat.

_Burn…_

_Burn…_

_Burn…_

The voices cried in unison! They saw the mother with her glasses looking at the flames that licked her belongings, carried and tarried her beer bottles that melted with an eerie orange glow. The browns and whites and greens began to blend with their molten tongues, dehydrating the van of all its liquid goods, about to explode, erupt, the gasoline having his mother's van bloodied with the flames, pop! Pop! His mother drove the sleeping babe out, and had blamed him for the fire, as if she knew, as the van exploded and called the police out of their slumbering eyes in a quiet town in Alabama, and he said nothing. There was nothing more he could say anymore in his life. The van, their only home, was gone. They were thousands of miles away from home. They could've died in the fire and have his suffering end. He wished he fell asleep when the flames surrounded him. Die burning and dreaming, wild dreams, curled black dreams as his mind was reduced to ashes. A Jew in a Nazi oven.

It was hours before a single customer arrived. Sonic still wore the dress that Shadow claimed would make him look "presentable". Espressos made his heart race after drinking his third one (to replace the alcohol in his system). The customer wore glasses without frames and was dark, tall, and a shirt that had Link from the Legend of Zelda rescue F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife rather than the princess in the game, along with Link's alcoholism and his mercurial moods. Literary humor combined with videogame humor. He loved it.

Sonic hid in the back of the cafe, hoping the man wouldn't see him. His cheeks burned, as if fire was under his skin, his heart blazing over his sudden embarrassment. The other workers never minded him, as they kept discussing over the summer blockbusters they watched while the man continued to watch them with listless disinterest.

His shoes reminded him of the ones they had in the cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland. The dress was made of lavished silk, the frills feeling light and soft on his touch. He couldn't deny he wanted to work, no matter if his father once said he was always lazy and never did anything around the house except sang and played his instruments. His guitar he had for over ten years still remained with him, and his mother once threatened to break it if he didn't help her out with the baby.

Oh God, the baby.

The man discussed videogames that were released over the years. He claimed he played nothing but Kirby all year, maybe some Mario, and Stone said he needed to play some Call of Duty. A game that was for real men.

His hands shook underneath the pallid cloak of his gloves. Delirium caused his body to experience sickness, the quaking, shaking, the sickness that held him! He haven't had a beer in so long, any alcohol since he answered the ad.

"Sonic?"

It was Mr. Shadow again, his voice sounding like sharp glass in his ears. He knew he was angry, that he wasn't doing his job and cleaning the tables. The sounds of the other workers laughing over the sad nerdy kid's defeat over not knowing the "true videogames" worth playing this year reverberated through the air, and Shadow sighed. "Jesus," he said.

"Jesus…wh-what?"

The world spun around him. It twirled like a ballerina inside a music box, the tinkling of the laughter and the sadness, the Conor Oberst music playing in the speakers, the images of the baseball players and Marilyn Monroe and Manson dancing alongside with him, a dance that wasn't in celebration or joy, but a sorrowful dance as Shadow continued to gaze at him with the bloody eyes and say, "Jesus."

He stood up, the laughter ceasing. He held the vomit in his stomach long enough to go to the tables, with his sea-green rag and clean them of all the coffee and crumbs he could wash away. Shadow's voice continued to reach his ears, the sound of a disgruntled 50-year-old hedgehog who only took the business because his father left him with it and he had no other choice but to take it: "I now see what you are. You got a drinking problem?"

The cafe went silent.

The sad kid took his mocha cappuccino without a thank you or any utterance of a robotic response. He could hear the birds chirping outside in that garish sun, look how happy the little bastards were. The gray bunny that might as well have been the white rabbit chuckled, the giraffe held her mouth delicately as if it would fall to her bosom, and Sonic could only shyly gaze up at him, his body feeling sore already from the rapid washing he did to try to ignore him, but the lack of drinks had weakened him, his mind was feeble and dusty, and he said, "Yes. I…guess you can say I have a bit of a drinking problem. I'll admit it."

He said nothing. He expected the almighty Mr. Shadow to fire him already, but his eyes had the edge of, yes! Yes! Disgust, but Shadow stood without a sense of power, with a sense of compassion for him, he thought maybe Shadow was one of those people who thought they could fix him.

The sad kid walked out of the Mocha Lounge without paying, and none of the workers noticed. It seemed automatic for anyone to dispense coffee for free after someone admitted the truth. Stone once claimed he had a felony for seeing another movie after finishing one, the Man claiming he was stealing. Some have thought the whole concept was ludicrous that they never paid for their lattes and coffees. Even poets stopped in mid-sentence. Brenda said she had an experience in college where she kissed another woman, and they also weren't paid for their soy espressos and their muffins. Some people expected to get something out of the store without having to pay. And Shadow knew this, but those customers never came again, and he knew that was why they were losing business.

Yet, there was no declamation that Sonic was fired. Even when he came to work in a maid outfit, even when he was experiencing delirium, and Shadow told him that "even hobos gotta have jobs. I'm a fucking Salvation Army here," and he could keep working ("but you better work," he said, "cause alcoholic or not, I don't want to hire lazy asses.")

He was both an alcoholic and a lazy ass, so Shadow won the lottery.

It was the afternoon, and no customers had come. Shadow continued to sit in his chair, watching the time go by. The brown walls welcomed him to his lair of shit, as he gazed out into the sunshine, the birds warbling and the sunstenched grass untouched by roads and buildings, the only light he had inside his office that stroked the face of his father. He often turned the picture over, just to ignore his face, his alcoholic, coffee-drinking face. He knew alcoholics when he saw them. And Sonic reminded him too much of his father. It was why he could never get rid of him.

Even if he never seemed to care for him.

The cafe continued to seep of silence into the late evening. He stretched his immaculate dress. No one came through its doors, still.

His breath smelled like whiskey. Even when he hadn't drunk any in a long time.

Stone made more catcalls to him, Brenda laughed and said he needed some stockings to complete the act, but Sonic continued to never mind them. He washed everything he could, even the pictures of the baseball players that grew some dust and had the frames yellowed over the years, and he sat in one of the leather seats as he waited for more potential customers as the afternoon grew into stark and dark night, and he could tell Shadow was beginning to rustle his keys in his pocket of his coat, signifying the end of the day.

A day where everyone learned he was only more of a burden than he really was.

Finally, a customer came.

She smiled like a pearl.

A preteen girl, no more than 13, came to order a hot chocolate, as she thought this place possibly had the best hot chocolates.

Shadow didn't smile back, though it was as infectious as herpes. He said, "So says so many people who came in here and tried them. We wouldn't be called a Mocha Lounge without it."

He was lying through his teeth. In his opinion, the hot chocolate tasted like hot piss from a diabetic with high sugar. But he couldn't bear to tell the truth at this sweet little girl, with her hair as brown as chocolate, her eyes like azurites, her dress pink as early morning with unicorns and rainbows. A sugary sweet girl. A little Lolita worth writing a book about.

Sonic assumed he could brush all the dirt and food particles off the floor and he could be done for the day, his broom taller than he was, seeming to blow away the fragments that the Mocha Lounge used to be, as the little girl pointed to the innocuous hedgehog in a maid dress and asked for his name.

"Hey! What's your name? I can't leave here without your name, cutie!"

Why was she interested in me? He asked. And why did she seem much more childish than a thirteen-year-old ordinarily would act?

He blushed a bright pink, the heat in his cheeks beginning to burn inside him. He smiled too. The girl's grin as she walked over to him and tugged at his arm and ribbons, it was…something he barely experienced in his life.

Immediately, he had fallen to an insurmountable tundra of affection from this little girl. She kissed his nose with lips as light as a butterfly's, she pet him like a house cat on her lap, and she whispered to him secrets. Secrets that he thought he would never know without that little girl loving him, her kisses giving his heart a flare, the toying with his ribbons and frills making him anxious, but her hands felt warm, full of kind intent, curious and childish.

The child may have regressed. Maybe, he thought. Could she bear to face the reality that she had to be put in middle school, had to deal with the growing changes in her body, and soon only cared about other boy's kisses? She didn't want to grow up, he could tell, a child who never had much of a childhood.

He wondered if he had ever done the same thing too, when he was 13.

Even when her hot chocolate was ready, she tiptoed towards Sonic, barely wanting to face her. He was supposed to be a miserable alcoholic trying to get a minimum wage job, he couldn't make any other child happy except for Tails, who was sick right now…who was possibly going to die. He had the touch of death. Necrotic fingers! She continued to dote on him, love him, wonder where he came from, hoping she could make him loved. This nymph from the lakes of Greece, walking with her finny toes and fingers, she caressed his head softly, Shadow watching, the other workers getting ready to leave for the night, as if the girl wasn't of any importance to them. Just another customer. Just another droid to leech off, their own Ma and Pop corporation.

Her hand was tender, small, as she placed it underneath his own, the girl laughing as she twirled his ribbons, kissed him, and pet him. Shadow watched the entire event as he was ready to go out in the cool summer air ready to drive away and leave the shop for another day. It was closing time, but yet he remained watching the girl, with his eyes appearing interested, his full attention on Sonic.

She brushed his rough fur with her hand, yet she mentioned how soft he was. He chuckled, purring slowly, his cheeks glowing brighter the more she sipped her hot cocoa and massaged his head, showering his face with kisses that smelled of chocolate.

He wasn't sure why she grew to like him. Was it the dress? Did it somehow have magical powers to achieve popularity among little girls?

It was 11 PM, as the other workers walked away and were met with the kiss of windy humid nights, but Shadow remained. Sonic remained. And the preteen remained. Shadow never told her it was time for the lounge to close.

"What's your name? I asked you that before, but you never answered."

His cheeks were so bright, he might as well have been Rudolph guiding Santa's sleigh.

"Sonic. My name is Sonic. It's just that…Sonic."

He laughed nervously as Shadow watched from a distance, his gaze seemingly to melt the more the girl had played with him. He had experience in raising Tails after his previous parents died, but he never considered himself good with children. But the more the hours droned by, he felt himself becoming more fatherly, more of a guardian to this girl, as she gave him kisses on his cheeks, petted his head as he desired more by brushing himself on her hand, and she scratched his belly, the hedgehog purring louder. Despite being so embarrassed about his condition and his place in the Mocha Lounge, he liked the attention, and he liked having someone tell him that he was worth it after all, as a girl would always love him, the "cutie patootie" he was.

Midnight soon masked the moon into darkness, and Shadow clutched his keys tightly in his fist as he watched the girl and his employee sleep away in the Mocha Lounge, her close to him, their bodies feeling so relaxed and dreaming, for once in Sonic's life, of wonderful, wistful things, as the skies were colored like a pointillism painting, the golden lights of the city blooming along with the red roses of the stoplights, and the white oleanders of the cars grew to touch the other cars and the pavements, shining so prettily to be eaten by the sun in the morning…

Shadow opened the door and locked away the cafe for the night. He watched the girl and Sonic continue to snooze as the stars danced alongside the building, protecting them from all harm. The lovely little girl, Shadow thought. I swear I've seen her several times in this cafe before…

He ignited his truck, while listening to his Harold Budd CD play "The White Arcades" as he drove down to his lone apartment in New York. He tried to count how many raindrops collected on his windshield, but he stopped at about forty-five. Forty-five was a number he felt satisfied with.


	4. Chapter 4

The glass was half-empty. It was all Sonic could think about, as he held the amber bottle next to his eyes, looking at the liquid that was ready to be drunk by his thirsty and greedy maw.

The little girl left him in the cafe after her mother called on their work phone. The mother, whose blond hair curled at the tips, her lips a luscious red just like his mother's, with breasts that wanted to be important and stared at, she held her child deftly and she gazed at him with those blue eyes he thought he saw on Precious Moments figurines, the little 13 year old with a soul, a heart, who wanted to play with her best friend again, an alcoholic hedgehog who had a son but would rather get cheap drinks in a bar then come visit him.

He felt bad. He really did (honestly he would say). Desire to remain drunk and impenetrable, impregnable, as the withdrawal symptoms melted away, and he became just nothing but a lowly drunk, paying only 1 dollar a glass of cheap beer that tasted of cattle piss. Alcohol, he needed it in his bloodstream. To function. To love. To even go meet Tails who was sick, his voice a weak whisper that would whimper his name to the hospital walls as the sirens had continued calling him, trying to get him to suffer the whirlpool that consumed many Greek men…

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…_

He could hear their strangling voices, their breasts barely concealed by their white uniforms, their syringes seeming to date back to the 1920's, listening to their clicking footsteps, the sound of the beast coming in to check on his meal, his prey of a child who hadn't lived a fulfilled life…

_Mr. Sonic…_

Before the doctor let him in the room to see his beloved surrogate son, he popped a Vicodin. It helped soothe him. It mixed well with the alcohol.

_Mr. Sonic…_

_Let the bitches sing!_

"Sonic…"

Tails' voice was barely uttered from his weak jaws. The doctors left him in the hospital, yet never had done anything for his leukemia. No chemo, no blood transplants. Just let the child suffer in its white and blue walls and its hospital bed made of steel like a latrine.

_Mr. Sonic…_

"I'm doing the best I can for you, buddy. You gotta hold on."

Tails nodded. It was all he could manage to do. Tails loved him, yet doubted him. He could smell alcohol on his breath. Cheap Mexican imports. Mead, the wine of Gods.

The smell of cigarettes ignited in his nostrils. He could catch the doctors outside of the pediatric ward in the long dark shadowy trees smoking. They talked about how most of the children only had fevers and some cases of pneumonia, but one was very sick. He needed chemo, but his surrogate father couldn't afford it. He was left in the hospital to die.

"Now who would do such a thing?" His breathy voice streamed tendrils of smoke in the gray sky.

"Some cheapskate artist who thinks public healthcare should be free."

"God damn," he coughed. "Who does he think we are? Canada?"

Pigs. The whole lot of them.

Miles coughed too.

"Am I going to be okay, Sonic?"

Sonic often left such matters to a God out there, but lately, he thought such a God didn't exist, ever since he met his mother's van and her insomnia.

He smiled. Tried to be reassuring. But he was sick, as frail as glass bones, and if he didn't get his paycheck to help the piggies start the little machines, there was no use helping Tails. The piggies just wanted to roll in the mud. Eat their caviar. Drink their wine. They didn't want to help children who were about to die.

He held his hand, and the nurses made him cough. They made him sick with their bacteria from their fermented bodies.

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…_

In one room, the nurses were threading a teenager's scars like a little limp doll. In another, they were rolling one amputated patient on his wheels, driving him to the cafeteria, to eat cold chicken sandwiches and hamburgers made from soy. Children crying about their shots, their arms bloodied as the mosquitoes drained them. Old men lying in a metal casket waiting for God to pick him up. Suicide patients wishing they never drank their pills, but instead shot themselves with a gun the old-fashioned way. Vegetables hooked to a feeding tube, the nutrients sent up their nostrils and into their brains, where they wouldn't deteriorate after years of neglect inside their lonesome bodies. No one hugged them. They were dead already, but families had kept them crucified to the living machines, keeping them as healthy and as alone as many years. Dying, very slowly, a light glimpsing from their tunnels, wanting to be taken to it, but God kept them as a testament to how great modern medicine was.

The whole hospital depressed him. Everyone cried and sighed and died in hospitals. No one was ever happy in them. No one was ever happy with the nurses' services. They just kept them alive so they could make money off their fragile and vulnerable bodies. The more you were alive and capable of being sick cause you were ignorant, the more they sapped money from your insurance and account.

He could still hear the whispers of the other doctors as they discussed over a pack of Marlboro's, of what kind of parent would leave their child in a hospital and not deal with him himself, and not pay for chemo. Piggies rolling around in dirt and mud. Eating their own kind as their steel teeth grind against their tongue and their voices filtered from their voice box, and they snorted smoke, ate it and blew it out like trains.

"Fucking selfish bastard," one said.

"What a goddamn ignoramus," another said.

"I heard he had a drinking problem," one said.

"Oh?" asked another.

"Yeah. He drinks whatever he can get. He was experiencing withdrawal symptoms here before. He shook and screamed and I was about to send him to a mental asylum until I realized he hadn't had anything to drink for a day. I told him, 'Here, take this pill, it'll help with your withdrawal symptoms. And call this rehab clinic; they'll be able to help you out.' And what does that bastard do? Turned out he had a stash of Vicodin he kept when he was in that car crash a while back. So he sold a couple and got some more cheap beer. The nasty Rolling Rock and Mexican shit. I know I can lose my license just constantly giving him Vicodin, but no matter what I do, advising him that he kept drinking like this for months he could die in another car crash or get in some sort of accident or have his liver fail, but he doesn't listen. He doesn't damn well listen. He just keeps drinking. Like he's got all the time in the world. I'd give him about five months before he gets cirrhosis. Or at the very least, end up having to pay for dialysis with his 'music career'. That family had been nothing to me but a pain in the royal behind. His father seemed sane enough. He died of a heart attack. But his mother? Oh God, his mother."

"What about his mother that makes her so awful?" another asked as he snuffed out his cigarette, the smoke drifting to the branches that held the souls of dead newborn babies. Sometimes the other could hear them crying, calling out for their mother who was supposed to love them.

"Hell if I know. I'm not a psychologist. I didn't go to medical school for that. But past diagnosis on her papers seemed to switch back and forth between 'bipolar type 1' and 'delusional disorder' and 'schizophrenia'. She bandaged her breasts cause she wanted to be androgynous, yet ripped them off when she had sex with multiple men. Glasses were always dirty. She was always dirty. Her nails were always so pretty though. Pretty, pretty nails. Her lips were gorgeous too. She never slept and ate except gas station food, which you know isn't healthy at all."

"Uh-huh," another said and nodded like a mindless bobble head.

His head kept going up and down; up and down…it was almost hypnotizing for Sonic to watch.

"Anyways, she kept offering sex to me. I said, 'No! I'm a doctor, not a nymphomaniac like you are!' Her nails, oh her pretty nails, she then grabbed some popsicle sticks…"

"Yeah?" Up and down, up and down…

"Then she got them all sharp, and tried to stab me with them. Then she grabbed the lubricant, and tried to stuff it in my mouth and she kept crying out, 'Fuck me, you pig fucker!' Told the nurses to sedate her and put her in some asylum. She managed to convince the nurses and doctors there that she was fine and she didn't need medication. Then she started drinking until she choked on her own vomit when she was withdrawing. Such a horrible death. And her son didn't care and never called for 911. He just left her to die. Funny how their family is shortly after his father died."

"Wow!" another exclaimed. Up and down…

"Yeah, and I hate treating him but I feel bad for his son. I heard that apartment he lives in is a dump. I'm willing to give him a chance cause I feel so goddamned sorry for him, but if he doesn't pay for some of this hospital treatment soon I'm going to just call social services. I could do it sooner, but mother always told me to give even the shittiest of people a chance. Even when his mother basically tried to stab me."

He might as well not give him a chance to call the phone that he was an unfit parent. Sonic left, while the sirens continued to speak his name softly, seductively, their candied bodies ready for him to lick and taste…

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…_

He walked alone in the streets. The morning was cold, uninviting, and he thought he saw a man with red eyes ready to stab him with a blood-stained knife as he walked through the crowd, but he tried to ignore it. It would give the legacy of his mother more power, more legend with her brain that was holed and rotted, with the doctor's needles protruding from every crevice in her mind.

—

He came home, as tired as a kitten full of its mother's milk. He didn't have to work until in the afternoon, so sleep! Sleep he must! His eyes were full of film, his body ached, and he popped another Vicodin as he downed it with the beer he got from a friend who might as well have been a bootlegger from the Prohibition era. Gatsby would surely supply him with all the drink he needed, before the magnificent bastard was murdered.

He tried to read his favorite books. He couldn't get past the first paragraph of Fight Club with his inebriation. He tried to count how many blankets he had on his bed, and he always had about four. Cause he was always so cold and clammy, his body feeling as if ice was inside it.

Couldn't read Dandelion Wine either. Or Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury was too complicated for his sickened and stupid mind.

He turned on the television set from the 60's. He tried to turn the knobs to exactly the right color. When he got it near perfect, he was suddenly bored of Seinfeld and How I Met Your Mother. He turned it to some football. Then realized he hated football. Then cooking channels. He mostly ate out of the microwave, so none of these meals would ever be accessible to his tongue.

He still only had a few hours to sleep…

He tossed and turned. Sea of blankets had to make way for Captain Sonic. The floor felt wet when his socks were moist upon touching it. Seagulls flew overhead, with their black canvassed bodies. A lighthouse was in the distance, shining a ray of light for him to reach, to become guided, loved, and forsaken.

Never forgiven for his heinous sickness.

The gulls careened off the edge of his bed, his socks damp as he walked across the apartment floor, feeling the loud slap of his feet hitting the sea. _Slap! Slap! _The sea was awake for him. The sea was alive, and it wanted to consume him.

He sweat, his forehead as wet as the sea.

He tried to stay on the island near his couch, the sand enticing him. Dry land! The winds bellowed towards his fragile bones, nearly blowing them away. His skeletal structure, his organs, his soul, they were lapped up by the hungry sea, as the water swallowed his apartment, the sea had crunched through the glass of his windows, civilization was dying as the sea had grown as it rained heavily, for 40 days and 40 nights, he knew. Heard of the stories, but never listened to them fully.

He wasn't sure if it was a hallucination. The water seemed real enough. The seagulls landed near his body and had tried to eat his remains as he stretched out on the island, his heart and stomach and intestines ready to be devoured by the white vultures.

The sun seemed so much brighter as he gasped and tried to keep above the surface, the godless creatures pecking him trying to devour his brain, the lighthouse never seeing a dead, shrunken body come towards its shores before.

He never felt lonelier here, on this island, with no one here, but death.

Death had awaited him, a stone sunk to the ocean, moonlit, albicant, a fake egg for a dragon long ago. He would drown with it. His gasps came out shallow as the sea had risen, the sun had knifed through his face and eyes, bleed! Bleed! Blood dribbled from his eye socket and chin. The sun was dangerous. Vicious! Merciless! His hand slapped against it, as the sea and stone tried to consummate him, and it felt so hot, the impact of a flaming hot stove curling his hands to dark ribbons.

He looked around his apartment. It was 3 PM. His hand was burnt. There was no sea or water, but only the liquor that drowned the stenched carpet.

Was it a third-degree burn? Has the sun made his injury caustic, his sins unforgivable? His glove was a pitch-black, like an aching hungry mouth.

He couldn't see the lighthouse that awaited him at the end of the ocean of buildings and cars in Buffalo. Over the people who walked to work and became drones, unlike him.

It had sunk away in the horizon. The blue sky that looked lamentable, depressing, with all the stucco blue. And he wasn't sure why, but he cried, before he tried to soothe his palm with cold water, wrapped it in a homemade cast and went to work.

The child who loved him so, he wasn't sure why she tried to cheer him up of his dreadful life. He couldn't be saved. Not by the deep sickness that Tails' parents had carried. Not with the sickness he was given, his understanding ruined by fog, a deep impenetrable fog that his brain had created, cause it wasn't automatic like the rest of them. It was made of broken parts. Parts irreplaceable.

He realized he was sick. The doctors had tried to inject him with lithium, with antipsychotics, but it only lead to a sore bottom and months of thirst and muscle-quivering and confusion. Telling the doctors of the side effects, he was only told to keep taking his medicine, ushering in the lie that it was all working, the machines inside the pills that were little gears to a brain that work like everyone else's. The machinery was intricate, those little green pills. The pink ones claimed they would make him "stabilized". The green ones made all the voices go away. But which one would make him bigger? Make him smaller? Both of them together made him the right size, but soon, he no longer took the injections. He was always so small, he wasn't sure if he could drive his car to work.

So big, so tall…he once was a proud hedgehog. A few years ago. But his mother's spirit returned. He was back to only mewing like a kitten.

Maybe that was why the little girl liked him. Cause he was only a cute little kitten to be adorned with a red ribbon and given to children as their first pets. Until the boy grew demented and hung it because the father kept telling them that if it kept making noise he was going to kill it.

His father wasn't abusive, but he had intolerance to animals making noise.

He was abusive to animals, in fact.

They once had a dog named Dash. When he was only a puppy, he soon turned out missing, and his mother never asked where he went. Sonic's heart mourned him, as he held his collar, and had heard rumors from the other kids that his father ran him over with his own van and claimed he was run over by another inebriated, ignorant man. He believed his father's lie, if only because he didn't want to bear to listen to the truth.

Mother bought a macaw from someone, claiming she needed more color in her life. Mother ended up letting it survive on the streets by itself. It was soon shot by someone. He assumed his father, yet that truth couldn't be born to listen to.

The kitten. He remembered it well. It didn't have a name, and it died nameless. He was only about eight years old. So young, so lovely, his pink collecting well in his fat cheeks, his mother so mad, so red in her lips and nails, her dress would be so shining and wondrous like the sun if it wasn't for the dirt and makeup that got from her face to the hems and seams. His mother once kissed him on those lips, had loved him, had cradled him when he was barely strong enough to walk and to hold a vial of milk to his mouth. Father was gone most of the time. Time seemed to slow down when he was in his crib, in his bed that had the walls dotted with his favorite athletes and his favorite videogames. Even when he was 8, his mother would sing him lullabies, give him a cup of warm milk, but strangely enough, the mother would say it came from her breast, because she loved him so. And she quoted from Where the Wild Things Are that she couldn't bear to see him grow up, or else she'd "eat him up, I love you so". She left with tears on every birthday. The kitten was a birthday gift, and he could catch his father never wanted to see him grow up, as the kitten had mewed for his attention so much that he threatened to kill it, he threatened to smash it with a sledgehammer. Sonic cried profusely and had screamed at his father that he'd kill it himself with dental floss, and he did.

He felt the house was always warm and rotting with animal corpses.

They suffered, but never the mother and father.

The noon sun was hot, his hands sweating underneath the gloves. He could smell the scent of grilling steak in the air. The Mocha Lounge awaited him, like certain death and epiphany, and he hoped that he didn't have to wear the maid dress. He could go in like any other normal male and wash the tables and dishes and picture frames like any other worker who wasn't forced to embarrass himself.

There were a few cars parked beside the employee's. It actually had a few customers.

He went inside, the sun drying all the tears on those same ruddy cheeks from his childhood, the feature his caring mother once said it was his best feature.

Several people were inside, talking, writing their books, gazing up from their computer screens to look up at him. They saw the casted hand, the drunken and swimming eyes, and the tiredness, the thorns collected in his lids. Shadow had approached him, looking at the hand, but trying to ignore the injury as he spoke to him.

"Time to put on that dress again."

Sonic was too tired to be indignant, though he asked the question of why he had to, and that one night was enough.

"I don't know what you're doing Sonic, but…" He shook his head. "Ever since you put on that dress, we had several more customers than usual. I think it's good for business, and it's apparently amusing to some people. Besides, you look like a total mess again. Go to the Marilyn Manson bathroom, clean up, and put it on. And try to be social. I think the customers would like it if you tried to make their day. You remember the girl who was here? You made her happy. And I think happiness can come a long way in business."

He sighed. If it was good enough for business, then it was good enough for Shadow, and there was no way arguing out of it.

He delved in the mocha-colored walls of the hallway to the bathrooms before Shadow stopped him again.

"Sonic?"

He said nothing, but faced him, hoping the tears were dissolved away by the sun by now.

"Promise me you'll start taking care of yourself a little better. You don't have to come in here looking fancy with a suit and tie and all that, but try to have some sense of professionalism. If you don't do that…"

"Then what?"

Shadow couldn't bear to say it. He turned, facing the wall, and only told him he would dock his pay by a few dollars.

"Tell you what, if you come in here wearing that dress and being pleasant with the customers and take care of yourself for a few weeks, I'll give you a small bonus. And hearing a little about you, you're probably going to need it."

He could only question his business practices as he was welcomed by the pictures of a bloody and Gothic Marilyn Manson on the walls, and he tried to clean himself of his filth the best he could. The filth of the alcohol he drank. Filth of the memories of the deaths of his pets. Filth over the doctors gossiping about his mother, how stricken with disease she was, before she choked.

He could imagine all the dirt washing off his quills and feet and hands as he tried to sober up in the sink, and he felt as if he underwent a holy ritual, that he had bathed in the Ganges River.

The day had loomed by, the sun ripping through the sky, gulping that depressing blueness with its pink and ruddy bleed. He had dressed in his holy work uniform, the white silk accentuating his spirit and soul. It had lied with some imaginary god he couldn't believe in, the shoes made of black velvet, teeth shining of ivory, the godliness shining deeply inside him. No one could make him cleaner than he was, as he smiled like a radiant opal in a jeweler's store, the customers looking with blank expressions, the shoes clicking against the hard floor, the ribboned underwear feeling tight, but he tried to smile, tried to remain pure, as he watched the customer writing his novel, which he could see the title, the cursor blinking against the screen, the font sizes mixed and matched with many colors and sizes, yet a new world was never made, characters were never born of clay, the seas never washed away the letters and created a world inside the reader's mind. Just a novel, talked about, whispered about, thought about, but never written. A blank, imaginary book and blank, imaginary riches from said "finished" book.

The novelist, a thin, bony man, wearing spectacles that made his eyes look much larger (he looked like a mole, Sonic thought) he looked nervous, his pores ached with sweat. Sonic asked him what he wanted his imaginary novel to be about.

"It's not imaginary! It's…it's really going to be a success. I have such a good idea, you really don't know! I could write so many words on my keyboard, I could become a pianist, an organist, make a symphony…make a song and seam those words into a great novel with my singing and my voice, you just don't know what I have here! I've been writing for an hour and a half! This novel really will be good, you just wait and see!"

"You're just messing with the fonts. You're not really writing. You're talking about writing but you're not really writing."

"Talking about writing _is_ writing. Planning to write truly is writing. You're too blind to see the letters here. I actually wrote an entire novel in my head, with this magical font I created."

He glanced at the laptop screen, to see if his novel was written in white font, invisible ink so no one could read his magnificent words that would soon be published for the world to see and hail him as a creative genius. But the word count stated he only wrote the title and his name. The brilliant masterpiece was only invisible to his eyes and the other workers, as the man had formulated a novel in his head, but hasn't laid them out in physical form. A baby that was being created in the womb, but wasn't given birth to.

His cheeks still lit up, a vivid red in the browns of the Mocha Lounge. There was a man and a woman sitting and eating a muffin (which they said had tasted like paper with food coloring and extra sugar to resemble the blueberries), smoking cigarettes as the smoke had entwined with the windows and the eggshell walls that he could sense were peeling off the more they puffed. They claimed they were artists, looking to gain a new vision, but they had artist's block, and had come to a new location to gain inspiration.

Was there truly an artist's block? He thought. He played music for a long time, had even at one point played his songs everyday to add to the ear-nausea of his mother and father, but soon was led to mediocrity when he had to move out on his own and encounter the truth about the adult world: that he couldn't truly escape from his problems. They were always there, and no matter how much he tried to drown himself with a rain of vodka, it was never gone. It never went away. His problems grew worse. He had no contact with his mom and dad to bail him out of anything. He managed to get a scholarship to college, because he was too poor to afford anything else in his life and he convinced the board that he truly wanted to learn. He truly wanted to make art, no matter how painful the birthing process was.

He had several miscarriages after dropping out. He tried to make a hit song despite all the knowledge he learned, and had ultimately gained no mastery of his acoustic guitar and his strange little instruments: his xylophone and baby-rattles and Fischer-Price toys that lied strewn in his mini-studio. Planned on making a eulogy to his childhood, how innocent it all seemed to be, before his mother went insane. Before his father was too stressed out to help him. He broke some plastic toys to make them sound like he had died in his childhood, as the toys croaked and squeaked underneath his feet and his screams, peeping only when he was done with his tormented rage. The toys could never comfort him. And soon, music, and the entire art process, couldn't either.

He wondered if these artists had suffered as much as him. That some sort of revelation, their pain and wounded souls and their crying minds completely sick with mercury that's excreted by the Bipolar Flower, the same flower that struck his mother. It was why she didn't eat for days. Why she would never sleep with both of her eyes closed. Her body was a machine that malfunctioned and recovered quickly, as the processing information in her brain's CPU was either very quick; able to pick up things in a snap, or was infected with viruses and spyware, and she ran as slow as her black depression, the river that continued to flow, with barely any waves. It just sucked you in. And drowned you for several days.

"What's with the getup, sir?"

They were commenting on his dress, which he thought had got much bigger and more brilliant each day. The dress that carried his own form of medicine. He could see them sucking down cigarette after cigarette, as if they were always hungry for nicotine, tobacco, and cancer filling their lungs. Sonic explained that it was apparently good for business. It was possible, however, that Shadow was being superstitious, or just wanted him to wear something to embarrass him.

"You look ridiculous. I would paint a picture of you. A crying hedgehog in a maid dress. Make the entire picture an oil painting, a stucco blue with a few whites and blacks to complete it. I could make it abstract too. I could make it talk about how we're ridiculed as a society to follow this capitalistic imperialism this president prides himself on. To wear the most fancy dresses money could buy, even if you were a man. Drink wine, have wine glasses hooked to your hand, have red lips and shining opal teeth, a pearl necklace, elaborate haircuts, an undying faith in American luxury and patriotism, to support the war going overseas, to secretly love North Korea that you slept with him, that you want the world to fall into a nuclear wasteland. And you want socialism, but you can't have it. Communism is locked away. It can't be obtained by simple methods. And by God, will you do anything to get it. Even wear a dress. The owner of this shop is a Communist, isn't he? I knew you weren't a capitalist pig like the rest of us."

He tuned out half of his words, turning the knob on his brain getting only static and mixed signals. He could imagine the madness continued to run, the machine that made his heart steel and metallic, made him believe in no fantasies and to succumb to this capitalism the man had talked about. But none of it, of what he received, made sense to him. It was only liberal arts college dribbles from his chin like a feeding infant, and he was glad he was out of college for one reason, and that was to avoid men like him, who were blind to the real issues: the issue was that no one truly cared about what he thought.

"You say a lot of bullshit for being an artist," he said. "Artists only speak about the truth in nature and politics and government and music and writing and all that. You think this dress is only a political statement? You think everything is literally symbolism for your bullshit paintings? Artist block doesn't happen from the blockage of ideas. You can remove it with nothing but a little hard work, and I used to play music every day. Novelist? You need to not be a hack writer, not talk about writing all the time, and actually start doing it. And you can't show off your little fancy degree in liberal arts. If you want to discuss the Truth with your fellow man, be honest and be open instead of being a close-minded bigot."

Shadow could hear the conversation echoing throughout the brown halls, as he stared at the picture of his once proud and standing father, hearing Sonic's voice ranting and rambling about the repercussions and the advancement that art had made in society all these years. The caveman paintings to the Mona Lisa to Salvador Dali and Picasso and Monet to the bullshit that New Yorkers would buy for the money they couldn't afford to stay in their wallets every time there was something they remotely liked: a roll of duct tape stuck to the wall in duct tape. A dog made out of green grapes. Art that any child could do, but yet these adult children were paid by the millions for their hackiture. And Sonic felt he could sniff them out, the man who couldn't compose a novel with his keyboard though he always talked about it, and an artist who claimed to be politically-involved but never knew what any of his words and stances meant.

He was losing customers! Out they went, petulant children! The Mocha Lounge had lost two great artists, one who would write a novel that was critically acclaimed, as he told children that they could imagine the book to be anything they wanted, any story they wanted to read, and the man was paid millions despite never written a single word on his glorious gold-leafed pages that was supposed to be his novel. The political artist drew a blue and white and black picture of a hedgehog in a dress crying after North Korea had wiped out the world in a beautiful Prussian blue, and while it wasn't a success when it was first conceived, it was a year later.

Sonic wished he had his guitar, able to string it and strum it, the strings made of celestial stars, and he would sing how the artistic world truly wasn't fair to the likes of him. Hacks always got far. The true artists always committed suicide before they ever found out they were geniuses. _So it goes._

Shadow had listened to the clamor outside of the main room, the workers complaining that Sonic's uprighteousness had killed business. Slain it with a sword as if it was a beast. Stone said if he was the boss, he would fire him immediately. Brenda said that Shadow was an idiot and should've fired him already, and that they would never be quite like a Salvation Army. She said the dress had done nothing for business and it was only luck two customers had come in.

"And you reek of alcohol again! What did you drink this time? Smells like Corona and schnapps. Do you literally drink anything you can get your hands on?"

His color had vanished from his face. The cheeks no longer glowed vibrantly with his embarrassment and charm. The dress no longer shined. The fur seemed to rot like the wall paint, curling up, turning a sickly yellow. So were his teeth and even his eyes, contracting lupus from his liver malfunction.

He wondered why Shadow had even hired him at all. A drunk when he first saw him, unkempt and unprofessional and ignorant and slack-jawed. Shadow insisted he stayed here, and even promised him to pay him extra if he cleaned up his act.

Yet he never appeared out of the hallway. Marilyn Manson continued to glare at him with his moon-scarred eyes. Night was beginning to bloom like a white lotus flower, and the other workers were ready to leave, while Sonic yet again wanted to stay here longer, to take care of business before he discussed art and was seen as pretentious and a hack.

He only made one album, and it never sold more than ten copies. He never got anything back from the people who bought his album that they liked it. Claiming he knew everything about art, Sonic thought. He knew nothing at all. He only knew his emotions, and as clear and as both pure burning white and darkening black they were, they never translated to songs right. His sadness was never weaved into a passionate, angst-ridden song, or had used his happiness to build something upbeat, catchy, and would always play in the bright smiling mornings of local radio stations. O how God had loved him! He had hands, he could construct something, but his ideas were never big enough to make anything worth glancing at with wondering eyes. He was a hack like the rest of them. A hack that wasn't worth burning millions of dollars for as if you didn't give a shit at all where your money went.

Stone, Brenda, and Emery left. He was alone, cleaning the nicotine off the walls. He sopped up coffee spills and had dusted away all the pieces of bread and sweet treats and the gum that was stuck by teenagers believing that gum would become illegal once North Korea had vanquished capitalism, and he cleaned the piss stains on the Marilyn Manson urinals. Just like how he always wanted them to be. Clean and tidy, for the men to continue to drip their waste and cum in the bathrooms.

His lids were beginning to close like the stars that were soon obscured by the clouds. He had to go home and rest. Shadow told him to stay for another half-hour.

"And why the hell should I? I basically fucked up your business! I made everyone hate me, and I'm pretty sure not another customer is ever going to come here again! What could you possibly want me here for another half-hour for? I haven't slept in nearly twenty-four hours!"

"I don't sleep either," he said.

"Of course you do. Everyone sleeps. Everyone is going to go to sleep dreaming they're kicking my balls over and over again."

Silence filled the Lounge. Shadow's eyes also had veins growing like vines in the corners, as he sipped another mocha cappuccino. Tasted like chocolate piss, but he couldn't ask for anything better.

"I don't sleep. Not these past few days."

"And why not? You got nothing to worry about. You got a good business here, before it was fucked up by me. You got good employees, except for me. Why did you hire me? I'm a drunk. I smell like liquor and blood and sweat and piss. You don't need me here. It was nice working for you, but…"

"Stay," he said.

"And why?"

"You…I don't know how to say these things."

He gazed at him, his eyes, red, sore, lack of sleep drying them, the night making him await mournfully for the bed, the bed he would lie in while many CDs covered him, the silver-ribbed blanket.

Couldn't say anything. The night dipped down, the stars shook the sky, glitter in a child's art project. Blood-rimmed, the prospects of getting another good night's sleep with another person willing to make him feel not so lonely, morning bleeds with a pierced wound, cry! Cry! He expected Shadow to say something, but he couldn't. His lips were too sore and sick.

"I feel too lonely sometimes," was all he could say.

"Me too. Join the club. Now I gotta leave before this business is pushed underneath in all this damn weight."

"Do you know what your son has? I'm the only one who could help you pay for his treatment. No one else will hire you and your music sucks."

"Nice rubbing it in, boss."

"What does he have? I'm sure the treatment costs a lot of money, and if you're willing to scrounge up anything you can get to help pay for his treatment while buying yourself a couple drinks to off yourself with while having some suicidal ideation, then I'm the only one who's willing to keep you drunk. Although you need to really stop drinking until your liver malfunctions; no one is willing to talk to you when you're in your deathbed. Do you expect anyone to help you after you lose your apartment and lose your son and lose your job and lose your possessions just to have a couple drinks in your system, and you're in the streets throwing up and covered in vomit and you're a drunk lunatic? Do you want that, Sonic? You have practically no choice but to work for me."

The cloth stopped cleaning the table of all its pasts' devourations. He thought of how lonely he was, living in this cafe, in his apartment, with a boss who only wanted him to keep working cause he knew he had no choice. Never had a choice, he reminded himself. His music was horrible, like the mead he drank not too long ago; looking to get some cheap liquor instilled in his machines. He vomited it up afterwards, the pickled-piss taste still remaining on his tongue. He needed something sweet. Like a cappuccino. But pickled-piss still latched onto his mouth like a sea creature with tentacles.

"You can have a cappuccino or two on the house. You can have three. After drinking that mead that my father once drank years ago. He wanted a cheap fix too. It didn't work. He threw up, just like you."

Sonic didn't want to ask how he knew that he drank mead before coming here. Shadow probably saw him before he went into work. Or maybe his father reminded him of so much of his alcoholism that displayed so proudly like a peacock in front of the cafe. And the millions of eyes kept staring back at him, wondering how sick was he that he had to sink this low, to look like a little girl's doll in a coffee shop (With the little ribbons and the trimmings, the silky underwear and the fluffy crown he wore to tell people he was only their slave), and he wondered if next he would be conducting sexual favors in front of his boss, have the lollipops licked like lusty children after sugary treats, he wondered if he would soon be like his mother, the mother that was mostly like a child, with her illness so prominent in her rimed and lice-infested brain.

The night slowly turned over its body, the naked woman that slept peacefully midst all the summer rain that collected in her hair. Shadow shook his head, and continued.

"My father has secrets. So does my mother. My father always had a lot of secrets. And so does my mother (_Why was he repeating himself,_ Sonic wondered.) I wonder if you were one of them. I wonder if he knew your mother. Your father. That much I don't know. But there are more things in this coffee shop than piss-flavored drinks. There's more to me than there is to you. I am more than me than you are perfectly you. Living by the garden and by the sea back in California, my mother was a rich woman, and she invested in fine artifacts and believed in Fay-like riddles and rituals. Very spiritual. I don't know why she chose my father as her husband. He's as atheist and dull and unbelieving as you are. He constantly told her there was no God. He told her that prayers were only useless, hopeful whispers. He said if there were gods, they were deaf to hear us, because we are so further from their grace and glory nowadays, that it isn't like Greece and the stories of Beowulf and the stories the woman told to the man who wanted to kill her for 1,001 nights, we are so despicable and disgusting that the gods decided to no longer hear our voices and instead only install them as white noise. There's so much noise we can only block out until the world is suddenly silent. My mother knew about the world of today. The advertisements that gave men no free will, their consciousness weak. She knew about how art was now barely classified by art except for the hipsters who come into this cafe. She thought everything contemporary had to be destroyed, yet preserved in its destruction, its last few shards dusting the floor. Therefore, my mother has something buried deep in this cafe, in the memory of my father, something that will shape society as we know it. In other words, calling upon the gods and making it to their own image. And you know what my mother said? The gods wouldn't change a thing. They liked us stupid. And my father chimed in that's how we believe in these outlandish myths in the first place."

Sonic tried to shape all the words in his sea-drowning head. Shadow also was rambling. Rambling as fast as his mouth moved when he believed in his little comforting psychotic delusions. A couple shots of scotch in his coffee along with Coke, he could imagine. Shadow, the drunkard, the Spaniard that believed in all these lies that historians made up so history would still be alive. There was no history. There were only lies. Lies that Buffalo used to be something else other than some sort of pissing contest between those who lived in New York and those who lived out of state. The hipsters, the businessmen that would tell him so much of the glory of New York, how magnificent it all was, with its empirical buildings, its cuisine, its sense of inflated importance. And Shadow had rambled about all this too, had said that New York was only a fantasy land made up of wistful Americans and immigrants, and it, in fact, was a shithole, the public pay toilet for all the celebrities to shit and bathe in.

New York, New York…his father had lived in New York before his wife had become pregnant. They soon moved to Buffalo, cause his father said he couldn't stand for his son to be tainted by the splendor of New York, its extravagance, but yet couldn't move too far away from his work, until the towers fell years ago, and he soon was laid off, paranoid of any other building falling like shed skin.

He then grew a sensible mind, divorced his mother, yet never cared to have the custody over Sonic, as he was about 16 at the time. He moved to Atlanta. He never came back and never contacted either his wife or his son again.

He denied Shadow's story. There was no story. As much as there was no God. Cause there, truly, was no God. He knew it. He saw Him, and He said He only existed to those without eyes. And so, he felt that his were torn out, and were replaced by those that were coveted by blurriness, the alcohol feeling as if he was underwater, trying to dive deep to find God again, but nothing. Nothing could ever prepare him for the possibility that his mother was as blind as Shadow's mother.

They were both spiritual lunatics, he knew that. They knew each other, possibly. They never knew that God actually lived underwater.

Shadow yawned, his back arched as if he became a thousand years old, and he could feel yet another summer rain coming. Smelling the air always gave him the hint of whether it would rain. And even in the cafe, with its coffee overpowering everyone else's senses, he could smell rain. And it calmed him. He often liked to sit back with his typewriter, reflect on the sound the rain made on his screen outside, on the ground that was parched for water, the heat that was now cooled down to a breezy drift, and he thought more when it rained, and he came up with his best ideas when it rained. His mother prayed when it rained. His father didn't go outside and drink when it rained. Raining was a good thing, and he prayed for it everyday.

Shadow's lids were half-closed, the warmth of the building ushering him to a culled sleep, as the rain was often his sweet little lullaby. Since he was a baby, when his mother sung mantras to him…

He cleaned up the last of his employee's messes, the coffee rings they never bothered to wipe off the counters, the bubble gum he knew Brenda kept underneath the tables along with other sugary bubble gum pop teens she was friends with.

A shadow to himself was as useless as himself. He was already dark enough to never be seen by the world.

He felt sad. Blue, as the radio played a somewhat melancholy blue song. Listened, waited for Sonic's reaction. He thought he looked cute, in that dress. It was another reason why he was in it. Cause Sonic didn't look as nearly as good as he did in a dress that made him seem like Alice from Lewis Carroll's book.

Sonic sat on one of the brass chairs, listening to the music that crooned on the station. Sonic recognized it as "Heaven Beside You" by Alice in Chains, Shadow unveiling a cigarette from a pack of Newport's and igniting it with the flame on his Zippo lighter, watching as the stars danced across the canvas of the screen doors, listening to the midnight rush of drivers coming back from work and going into work, to get a fill of fast food in their stomachs and a couple of beers, and crickets chimed in the lush grass, blackened and shaded completely in the dark liquid of night.

He often thought night in Buffalo looked like his own cup of coffee. Black, with many lights surrounding it, maybe things swimming in it too (at least, he hoped not).

Silence, as no sounds escaped from their lips except the extinguishing of the smoke from his cigarette. Sonic thought he could have a cigarette too, but despite his desire, he thought he would be a bad influence on Tails, and he couldn't bear to see him smoke either, having another sickness he had to worry about.

"I have a lot of hope for you, Sonic," Shadow said.

He crushed the cigarette on the leather seat, his voice growing quieter the more he spoke certain syllables, the night cascading further into more obfuscating darkness. Sonic wished he could go home. It had been so long since he had another drink, another taste of schnapps on his tongue…

Shadow continued to speak, as each second was voiced from his lips, his lidded eyes stung from the smoke, the black coffee keeping him up all this night. He denied in everything he said, though his brain was vied to believe in it. About the mysteries of his father. About his mother being a bit too snooty to love him fully. Father was too drunk to notice him. Replaced the addiction with a coffee addiction, drinking 7 cups in one day, hurting his heart to the point of a heart attack, and soon, he could never remember his misdeeds, and only remember his father once being a good man. Until he thought he was so thirsty he couldn't be ever parched.

Sonic tapped his fingers to Shadow's CDs. His Alice in Chains and Harold Budd and Steve Roach and Nirvana, he listened to a eclectic mix of music, and soon it was about 2 AM, where Shadow was finally too tired to speak of his family woes, and too tired to even drive the truck home.

He spilled a half-full cup of cappuccino on the floor, Sonic seeing it as his blood, his passion towards keeping the memories of his father alive spilled out to him. Except he wasn't sure if he could listen to his quiet voice. He cleaned it up.

Why was he here? Why did he make him stay for several more hours than he needed to be? Why did he reveal about his family history, the snooty bitch, the drunken bastard that only loved him when he drank coffee, he wondered how the dress cast a spell over people to tell their problems to him, as if he was a therapist. The little girl told him about how lonely she was sometimes. Shadow also related that problem to him that he only had one girlfriend and they broke up after a month of dating. So many things he listened to in his career of working in a coffee shop, or he had to admit to himself, he probably was the same as a male stripper.

Just like mother, the men cowered to her and told her their secrets. How they wished to kill their sisters and brothers, how they once killed the family of goldfish in their aquariums, set the house on fire, never finding a good enough job to sustain them, so they sold drugs and tried to get high on 8-balls and meth. And The Mother welcomed them into her warm cove, allowed them to sleep there overnight, comforted after their drink and food was garnished and cared for, The Mother was a holy land unto itself in her magical van, where men could come and be nourished all they wanted from her ponds and streams as long as they provided the dough.

The Mother soon died. By choking on her own vomit. He saw her choking. He held the phone firmly in his hands, the three numbers ready to be pressed, his fingers shaking as she gargled for his name and the pleas for him to help.

He smashed the phone on the floor and walked away from her. When the police came, he told them that yes, he knew his mother was dying, but no, he didn't want to help her. He could've been charged, but the police saw his pupils dilated, as he carried around a canteen of vodka around his neck. They decided to ask no further questions and just take The Mother to be cremated.

Like a Jew in a Nazi oven, he said, smiling.

Shadow lied on the floor, his body wrapped with the dress that Sonic discarded to warm him, and he left, before the morning ached to be free from the dark's clutches.


	5. Chapter 5

_So this is where I say Goodbye…_

_This is where my story ends…_

_If there's one thing that I've learned, from life…_

_Is that it gets you in the end…_

His eyes felt tired, lazy, still moist with dew, as he glanced around his bloodied and carcassed room and saw demons sitting on top of him, with their pearly smirks and their claws smelling of iodine and their eyes black abysmal holes. He wished he could get away from them, but their nails, they hooked him, they nailed him to the bed, and he wished to scream, but the demons taped his mouth shut, their nails scratching his flesh, snickering, crackling like fire from the place they were born in.

_So goodbye, my friend…_

_Goodbye, my friend…_

The melancholy song continued to drone and drown his ears, the distortions, the hopelessness seeping from every word. He knew Chris Hall had sung out his agony in this song, with his depression, his drug addiction, and now, alas! Hope was lost, nothing could be saved. It was time for the demons to devour him. The vultures they were! Their wings were like knives, cutters to slice him in different pieces. Hungry voluptuous teenagers! They were men, yet women! They had breasts, yet had penises! Like mother, he cried. Like mother, oh mother, my lovely mother, may you rest in hell among these other savages…

The demons couldn't even let him pray. They sawed through his mind with their sulfurous eyes, and the demons' asses were a ton on his chest, and he could barely breathe through his glass ribs, his body seeming to collapse under the barbaric shit-stained spiky buttocks as they continued to grimace and taunt him, laugh and sear through his ears, their nails seeming as long as curved moons in the sky, their horns like goats, and they chanted through their cancerous breath, that he would see them in Hell too, along with his mother, along with his father, along with the baby whose soul they decided they would reap. Satan had awaited him, in his black chariot, with the horses the color of death, and the room smelled of death, and he could swear that he was dying under the weight of the demons, and they mocked him by gyrating their pelvises, saying he wanted them, but if he wasn't so paralyzed, his body catalyzed from the demons taking over his muscles, his vessels and his veins, his heart and his lungs and his eyes and teeth, he could feel his pupils dilate, and he said if he wasn't so paralyzed, so much, he claimed, that he would vomit on the floor. Rotting, the room decayed around him, bleeding like a virginal woman, the caustic wounds on the meat of the walls beginning to scintillate and vibrate and pulse grotesquely, and the tunnels! The tunnels! The black and white! The diamonds around him! They were diaphanous on his quills, as they surrounded him, blinded his vision, cauterized him like cattle, and he could hear the voices of the demons screaming at him that the lord would forsake him, always hate him, and would send him to where he belonged. Hell was a 24 hour place for spirits and souls like him. The demon's asses had left and they now turned to eels, swimming in the long tunnel, the tunnel of love, the demons wishing to sting him with their electricity, the eels no longer with diamond claws and diamond teeth and cabochon eyes. Wretched wickedness! Stricken with sickness! He could feel his lungs quiver inside his body, the oxygen tree wanting to be more alive, more vibrant with his air, and the glass ribs were safe, for now. He could imagine the eels wanting to sit on him again, with their snake skins, their bodies coiled, the moon ready to pierce him so quickly as soon as the tunnel of affection and love had ended…

_Goodbye…_

The room decayed around him, slowly, with every second that breathed out from God. He knew a monster was inside the walls. A monster that needed to be treated with his suffering. His alcohol lust. His hate. His green eyes, soft pastels ready to be used by an artist to accentuate a piece, he woke up as the morning was still young with the wet fresh smell of dew and period blood, and he watched as that blood was drained out by the sun, a baby that loved the world and was grown to love him too, the mother, oh fresh baby sweet Sonic…

Mother Rosemary Prower! Did she love Miles before he? Possibly so, before she suddenly died of unknown causes. Ralph Prower had christened the baby as Miles, but soon, his christening was changed, as his mother and father had realized his nickname as Sonic sat on their supine and cherry-colored table, lion-footed, and he claimed that he called him Tails, ever since he babysat for them.

Fancy-shmancy people, the Prowers were, before Miles was adopted into his family. Ralph wore fancy Polo suits and cardigans, and Rosemary wore dresses that Sonic would be ashamed of wearing to work but knowing everyone would love him anyways; he would wear these abominable frills and laces just to get some confidence in his life. Her hair gray and fashioned to a somewhat Marge Simpson-type style, while Ralph was a lot like Miles that he had several fingers of hair protruding from him, but nothing more. Fancy-shmancy people, he claimed. Look at them eat their caviar, their elaborate chocolates made from the finest chocolatiers in Germany and Switzerland, look at them play tennis and polo, golf and Marco Polo, look at them, cause it was the last of those kind of people he would see in Buffalo, before they decide to move to New York, to have fancy apartments, to get married in the Four Seasons hotel, to have a wonderful time living out their life, la-dee-dah, how wonderful does money truly make you.

Miles moved from a wonderful, loving, luxurious home to a shit-filled pus-house like his.

"We will be going to New York to see a new art show. Take care of Miles for us. Take care of him as much as your mother took care of you! You are a proud specimen, Sonic. A very proud hedgehog that can only take care of our son as well as we can. No snacks with glucose and high-fructose corn syrup, please. Organic. We're a very organic family and we'd like to keep it that way."

She said as Sonic handed Miles a Snickers and her proud, vulpine ears couldn't pick up of the noise of the wrapper crinkling.

"Going to college, I see?" Her snootiness was exemplified by how she went to Harvard, and so did Ralph. Sonic only went to Buffalo University, but she said that he should reach higher, make sure he can go to Yale if he can, and have clubs, meet up with people, because she thought Sonic was lonely, somewhat miserable, but found him to be very bright, highly intelligent. And her words continued to ooze of superiority over the education her and Ralph had received, as their parents had gifted them with a golden spoon in their mouth, encrusted with diamonds.

"Let's get going, Ralph. Don't eat too much of the organic food now. Too much fiber can really spoil your diet, dear Sonic, but I'm sure that fructose and glucose will rot your brain if you ever ate enough of it. Ugh, Sonic, put that away, that Pepsi is only diabetes in a can! And that Snickers! Your very Midwestern type of living needs to be cancelled out once you reach the big city, New York is a very wonderful place."

She screamed at Ralph to get in the car, as the streetlights dazzled around them. The city smelled of only gasoline and money, sweet money that the Prowers always had, and they always would get. Because relatives of theirs kept dying, but yet when they had died, they didn't give Miles or Sonic any share of the profits, as they believed that even that much power could corrupt them, the impressionable young minds that the Prowers believed that Sonic must've come from the Midwest to want to have such a shoddy music career. They believed that anyone who was mediocre and drank and ate high fructose corn syrup came from the Midwest.

"Indiana? Michigan? Where did your family ever come from?"  
"My father came from New York you know. I don't know where my mother came from, but…"

"Oh, possibly Illinois? So bourgeoisie your mother is. Detroit I'm sure."

Miles' mother also made insults targeted towards his mother often, always was his mother targeted, but he didn't mind, as his mother deserved all the insults she could ever get hurled at her.

Before she rode away to the city that claimed the dreams of many artists, photographers, writers, and musicians, he asked Rosemary if she could call his mother a slut.

"Pardon me?" she asked.

"I know you don't like my mother. I know you want me to try to escape from her influence. I know you want me to have a better life with you and Ralph and New York and all. So why don't you call her a slut?"

The cabdriver said he didn't have all day, and it could wait.

The car window rolled down, and Rosemary flickered her electronic cigarette as she said, "Sure, I can call her a slut. But Sonic darling, you're on that road too. I suggest you clean up your act, get better grades, and I'll write a letter of recommendation to Harvard for you. I see you becoming something promising, my dear Sonic, and a musician slash artist? I just don't see it. Isn't that what your mother wanted to be too?"

The window veiled her face, and he could see the dancing snow around him reflect the lights from the road, the bite of frost striking his face, but he held Miles' hand tenderly in his balled-up fist, and he actually wished he never had to see Mr. and Mrs. Prower any longer.

As Miles ate Froot Loops after they wasted an organic egg of Sonic trying to cook breakfast (the egg was bloody, and he thought he could even see the fetus of a chicken coming out of it, peeping out of its little pink rubbery voice, and he threw away even the bamboo bowl he held and just asked him to eat the high fructose corn syrup-full foods Miles requested), they watched the news on that cold December morning, the newscaster announcing that Raphael and Rosemary Prower were found dead. Of what cause? They asked with their tiny voices. And he said he wasn't sure. No one was for sure. It sounded like a murder, a suicide, it could've been anything, but Miles couldn't find himself loving them, even when their dead carcasses were shown on the screen. Sonic believed that he had done a terrible thing that night, with his mind powers able to effectively murder people. His mind, it aches! It had an icy knife and it had killed Miles' parents!

The snow gathered outside. The small frosty fingers stretched among the canvas of the windows. St. Peter's cross became white, cold, sickened, and he thought Christ all had a plan against him. The death of the bitch was the death of him and the world. Fingers were frozen, glued inside its carapaces, and he tried to laugh with his frosty fangs and his frosty heart, and Miles wasn't sure if his new father was mad. The father who now couldn't live at the estate, and instead live in the apartment that rotted of reeking flesh and smelled like fermented alcohol, mushrooms growing in the bathroom with their long smooth stalks, and their brown, oaken heads. Blessed be to the mushroom people! Sonic held Miles' hand as tightly as he could and took a swig of Ralph's absinthe. Miles cried, small slivers of tears falling as fast as the snow drifted around them. It rained that night too. Rained with a child's single tear.

He thought he could hear a growl, festering flesh from the inside of the walls, the organs inside his apartment. The heart, the lungs! They invested every part of his home, the excited eyes of the windows, the nails it sheathes on its porch, the teeth, how they shined like lugubrious candles! The stalactite of light! How the monster feeds on his emotions, his love, his pain on the dream, the memories of Miles, the sickness that Miles had, the agony he experienced when he heard the song, the song that had molded into his brain like a green festering wound of bacteria, and how he would become even sicker inside the home! The viruses inside the house had injected and infected him, as he remembered how happy they once were, after the fancy-shmancy bourgeoisie people had bit the dust and decided to go to a fancy hell where they belonged. Sonic had taught him how glad he should be of the simple things, the American things, as they watched baseball on television, had celebrated a Super Bowl and had stuffed themselves with buffalo wings and chip dip, and Sonic had admitted him to a regular, non-fancy school, and Tails said that he loved it, and liked to be considered a "normal" child with "normal, regular American values". The house that once was owned by Rosemary and Ralph Prower was sold to a lottery winner, and so much of a behemoth with his high-fructose eating ways that he trashed the house and had the police often come to his house for his celebrations of the many women who wanted to have sex with him cause he had money, wonderful money, but soon that wonderful money had run out, and he left with the home wretched like a black infected scar. Sonic believed that house could be talked to. He thought he could hear its heartbeats, its garish cries, its skin beginning to be overrun with beetles and cockroaches. The beautiful home had soon been torn asunder by ignorance and hate. The Prowers couldn't wish for such a fate any other way.

Miles had sat and watched the spring morning arise, the sun that was opened by the clouds, the blinds of God, the canvas of God that he began to paint with a multitude of colors. A chiaroscuro, and Miles had sat and saw the cherry blossoms bloom, their kindly faces, their womanly faces, as they fell to the sidewalk, and often, he laughed as he danced under them as the morning had risen and all the city residents began to wake up, and Sonic played out a few tunes of his new album, the song that Miles said would make him a "billion, jillion dollars", and Sonic smiled, though wasn't sure if he could admit to his assurance.

He drank more of the leftover liquor from the home that rotted beneath them, a nice hint of absinthe, and he played, as the world bloomed like a rose around him, and Tails played in the spring flowers, and laughed cheerily as he ran across the blocks, yelled at the other children that were walking in the streets to come and play with him, but even if he was ignored, he was still happy, and he thought even if he was only 8, he had never felt more alive in his life, and would always remember the time that Sonic had adopted him in his arms, had truly taught him to live, had made him as free and as liberated as a caged-up zoo animal seeing the wilds of the savannahs for the first time, and despite the old crones that screeched at him to not come towards their home, and the rain that lightly sprayed when he walked further in the city, he believed that he was born that day, and he was just as alive as a newborn infant. The other patrons of the city told him to go home, he was nearing the dark depths of the city he should never reach, and was soon nearing the slums of New York, did he finally decide to hail a taxi with the last of his allowance to go back home, while Sonic continued to play his guitar and make the final auditory touches on his album he planned to sell in the streets in the next few weeks.

That sudden happiness, that brief euphoria, something had happened to Tails. He grew sick. He coughed often. He missed many days of school. Sonic had enrolled in college, and tried to keep Tails' spirits bright with soon graduating from college with a degree in music, and how rich they would be with Sonic's wonderful songs that Miles often sat and listened to, and they would live a life just like Ralph and Rosemary, and they would be happy while still attaining their American life. The apartment would soon be left to whoever was unfortunate enough to live in it (possibly the lottery winner, who had no money and only wanted husky and desperate women to suck him off), and they could live with more cherry wood around them, with the smell of the blossoms always ignited in the air, and Sonic had sworn to Tails that it would always be spring, in this little world of theirs. It would forever be as rejuvenating and reviving as the memories of when Tails was born, in those lone, quiet Buffalo streets.

The year had passed, and Miles grew sicker. His blood and body felt weak. He soon couldn't go on with the 3rd grade. Sonic had complications himself.

He soon fell in a pit of depression. And he wasn't sure how he could ever get out.

_So goodbye, my friend…_

_Goodbye…_

_So goodbye, my friend…_

_Goodbye…_

Suicide. How wonderful the option seemed to be. He smiled as he thought of dying. He smiled as he thought of turning his petals inward, his quills inside his body, his life withdrawn from reality, the snakes coiling around him. He once said Miles was lucky that he was dying, about to be admitted to a hospital, because he often wished the same thing. To be taken care of by women who were paid to care. To eat food that was better than anything he could make. To see doctors discuss how his life was soon running from beneath him. He wished to die. He wished to be taken away and into God's arms, if he truly did exist.

The barely eating saga began at college. Ramen, Oreos, and Coke were often he ate. He found sustenance in nothing else. He read his textbooks over and over, yet couldn't understand them. Many of the textbooks had lied strewn on the floor, while he tried to write down theories he had about his own music, but as Tails walked over to the dark room held aloft by only one lamp light, he heard the song that claimed he was going to die, he was going to die because his life was meaningless, and Tails told him he should eat something nutritious and come with him.

"It's chicken noodle soup. That's about all I know how to make. But…you're scaring me, Sonic. Your health is…bad. We need to make you see a…" He coughed, facing away from Sonic. He hoped the chicken noodle soup would help him too. It was the white man's cure to all illnesses in life. Even psychosis.

"I don't want to go out there, Tails. That's where all the liars and spiders live. That's where all the fliers and the buyers live. I want to figure out what I need to put in my music. I need to figure out what I can do to make it good. Leave me be. Just let me try to understand this textbook…it says, that John Lennon was really killed by Holden Caulfield."

"No, by a guy who was obsessed with Holden Caulfield. Come on Sonic, you're starting to scare me…"

"Scare you?" he cried. "This is me, Tails! This is who I am! You know that I'm God, don't you? My mother worshiped me when she was a whore! She worshiped me when she drank and drank! I'm the drunken God! The God of alcohol! A drunken Buddha! Monk! Saint! Plantain! Taint! Defecate!"

"Come on Sonic; just…just eat something good. You probably haven't eaten anything nourishing in so long, that it's starting to affect your brain a little…"

"I don't need food! I never needed food! I am a god, Tails! And you failed! Don't give me some chicken and nails! I can't read fucking Braille, you know, you know, you know…"

The song repeated. Chris Hall continued to whine with his suicidal sentiments. Tails threw the scalding pot of chicken noodles on his face, and Sonic barely flinched, sucking all the broth he could from the dripping parts that ran away from him on his body…

Another spring rose. And Tails was admitted in the pediatric ward of the hospital, for leukemia. Sonic was told to see a psychiatrist after he dropped out of college. His diet improved, his sanity had been returned to his brain, yet he had a great sadness. A sadness that took away everything he enjoyed. Miles was no longer there to comfort him. To be happy. He could no longer hear the callings of Rosemary and Ralph, saying he would never be a successful musician, and his mother, oh how callous she was, with her liquid lunch and her sexual encounters with men just to make a quick buck, her dirty glasses she never cleaned even if there was a fabric of white rust on them, her nails were always prim when she was covered with vomit, as the medics had swarmed the house, asking Sonic what happened.

"My mother…My mother…"

"Yes, we know. What happened to your mother?"

Sonic was unkempt. He wore a dirty t-shirt that was ripped and torn in edges, his quills were frayed, never combed and washed in weeks, and even his green eyes looked dirty, as dirty as he was, as dirty as his mother's glasses that were covered in chartreuse puke, which were finally cleaned by the morticians when they examined her body.

"Speak up, boy. What happened to your mother?"

The spell was no longer in effect. Yet he couldn't find himself speaking to them.

"Did you murder her? Did you have any intentions to kill your mother?"

_Speak;_ he could hear the voices say. _Speak now or hold your peace._

"I didn't kill her."

The phone on the floor, partially covered by vomit, broke, several buttons and wires misplaced, and he continued to stare listlessly, as he said that his mother choked on her vomit, but could never bring himself to call 911. In fact, he was glad to see her dead. Good riddance, he added.

"You do know you can be sent to juvenile hall for this, right boy? You didn't help her. You can be sent away for a long time. Then you truly can't say good riddance anymore."

"I don't care," he said, bored. "I'm just glad to see her dead. Dad is gone too. I'm alone now. You see how alone I am? You see how sick I am? I wanted to die for the longest time, and now she's gone, I can truly live again."

"You don't really mean that, do you boy?" His face got closer to him, that he could feel and even taste the spit that came from his tongue as he scolded him on how he truly didn't want to live in those "nuthouses".

"You can't sleep in. You can't drink your alcohol. You've got to take medication, and I'm sure you wouldn't like that very much, boy. I'm sure you wouldn't like being beat up by those fucking weirdoes in there. Do you understand you can be sent in a place like that for a long time? For months? For years? You seem very sick, boy. Maybe you need a rest. Maybe that's the best thing for you. A rest."

Sonic sat in the dusty den he inhabited in when he was severely depressed, what seemed to be just yesterday, and he turned it onto Stabbing Westward's "Goodbye" song again, as he looked at the dark man's face, and said that he had to do what he had to do.

"Goodbye mother," he said.

The police locked the doors tightly and handcuffed him, as they believed he would hurt himself "if he truly had the chance to". The man who questioned him told him that he would be sent to a high-class institution, simply because he "felt so sorry for his sad, blue little ass".

"I'm sorry for my mother, too, in a way. That I was still with her when she was alive."

"Why? Why couldn't you be sorry that you didn't help her?"

"Cause I think I was the sole reason that she went insane. It was me. It was me all along.

"I was the reason for my mother's insanity.

"The baby couldn't have been the culprit.

"Neither was my father.

"I caused everything. I even caused the towers to fall on September 11th, 2001. I am awful. Evil. Full of sin. Take me to prison. Take me to a concentration camp where they will treat me and kill me softly. I want to be an angel. I want to be an angel when I grow up. I want to be dead."

The police wrote on their small pad that Sonic was "in a state of psychosis", and he told him, "Don't worry. Belham is a good place. A very good place. But it will be a while before we get there. Take a good, long rest. Think about the happy memories of your mother. She'd appreciate it."

And he did. And he felt a long river of emotions that he hadn't felt in such a long time.

And then he went to work, shutting the door, and smashing the CD player against the wall. The CD was unharmed. And if it was, he always got another one.


	6. Chapter 6

Suicide loomed over his head. He drove his car to work, hearing the song that threatened him, and by God! Did he wish to die! His death would bring upon many good events. He would no longer have to wear that damn maid dress. He no longer would have to suffer the effects of killing his mother by only calling the 9's, never the 1's, oh how wretched he was! So stone cold was his heart! His mother lied in a grave that was vandalized by many teenagers, and he never corrected them, never fixed it, he just let her rot in shame.

Mother, Mother, how bad could you be to me? How good could you be to the baby? How well was I treated at that hospital? Mother loved the baby. Had pacified it with her glorious sun-rimmed nails. The baby had giggled often, believing that it would lead a happy, fruitful life. Never before had he seen a baby so happy, after him. The bitch had kissed the baby softly on his head and told him that if he ever laid a finger on him, she would break it and chew it and swallow it. The venomous mother, the snake that would devour all of his evil, make him pure and clean. Not at all like Satan with Eve.

The baby's name was Blayze, another strange, schizophrenic name that his mother gave him. Like Sonic (she debated having the end of his name into a k, but his father debated calling him a name that would be as normal as it could get. "Sonic" seemed to fit, and the father went back to his meetings and his money-making ways and very rarely conversing with his mother. Sonic saw his father's face for only a few minutes, then he never had the feeling that he was a father, that he created something with his penis that webbed neurons and veins and arteries and a heart that continued to beat, _thump thump thump_, against his chest, hear it break apart as his father left him with the bitch who today was wearing blue frosty lipstick, while she tried to seduce the doctors to having sex with her on the operating table. She imagined the doctors taking so many surgical tools and tearing through her vagina and entering organs inside it to make a new body. That was how Blayze seemed to be born, years later.).

A long thin claw-like instrument was left inside her as she gave birth to Blayze, and as she seduced more doctors to tear through her uterus. Leeches might've been inserted inside of her. Maggots and cigarettes and cigars and false eyes and false teeth and false organs, she could've made another infant with that concoction. But it never happened. Sonic killed her before she had another.

The baby cried, in the long hours of the night.

It never stopped crying.

Even when it died it never stopped crying in his mind.

The baby often demanded things of him, he thought. Mommy needed aspirin to ignore the baby. Mommy needed music turned up so loud the neighbors complained. Mommy needed the dog shot. Mommy needed the child to be ushered quietly besides her body, listening to her heartbeat, hear how quickly it shot through her chest, and she crooned lullabies as she swayed her body gently with him, calming him instead of the baby. The rare moments where his mother was kind to him. Her nails were the color of infant pink in the light. The baby cried, and soon the mother's face scowled, she grew a twisted smile, she slapped Sonic's cheeks, and told the baby to be silent else she'll suffocate it with a baby blanket, hang it on the balcony like the kitten that Sonic once had.

So Sonic took care of the infant as his own. His body reacted to the cries of Blayze; he could hear his hollow and shallow sadness, his fists raised so pathetically in the air, the little weakling, how red his face always was like a little beet. Mother called him a little mouse when she wasn't in her torpid moods. Sonic often sat by the candlelight, watched as the stars dissolved like stomach acid in the sky's stomach, and he sung him tiny songs, songs that would fit his tiny heart, songs that would comfort him with a mother who was as strange as his sudden emergence.

_You are awake, and see the darkness,_

_The gemmed eyes of demons, you expect them to love you._

_The candlestick, the cavern that waits to consume you with_

_Breast-fed teeth…_

_The small wick melts in the tune of your eyes,_

_Groveling at the new scents of visions, the colors that people had grown_

_Sorrowful by._

_Blue._

_Chartreuse._

_You have seen the world in its ugly colors._

_The hospital walls melt like the candle._

_It dissolves into the spindly light._

_And you can hear the flame being tucked to sleep._

_With a small whisper of "ssh, ssh, ssh"._

Blayze fell asleep. It was the first song Sonic had wrote, one that didn't had rhyming lyrics, but it would do well in his efforts one day.

The baby soon woke up again, with a sharp, ear-piercing cry.

Sonic had a headache, hearing the infant cry. Mother had a migraine, from hearing the infant cry needlessly and endlessly. The mother cried also, for the infant to be quiet.

"Blayze, you're such a little brat! You want this, you want that! It's so unfair! I have to work! I have to make money! You keep wanting things!"

His mother had addressed the infant when it could barely discern the words "want" and "need". As if it was a child, a few years older when he was only a few weeks.

His mother regressed, to a girl who wanted to look pretty for the boys, who wanted to play with the newest toys, who wanted, wanted, and only wanted but never had she needed to take care of her baby. Babies were no responsibility for her anymore. Just soothing Sonic from the needy baby when he deeply wanted to take care of him as much as he could.

He was his brother. A brother he had to take care of.

The milk was drunk like beer bottles. Sonic often researched all he could on making formula, on carefully microwaving and cleansing the nipples to feed Blayze with. He researched why Blayze had cried so much, why he never looked him in the eye and instead up at the ceiling. Why even comfort made the poor brother cry even more. He wondered if he was a bad brother, a bad father-figure to him. He rocked Blayze, and still he cried. He tried to entertain him with puppets and comical movements, and still he cried. Giving him colorful lights to look at. He cried even more. Never looked in his eyes and instead on the floor or ceiling. He wrung his hands and gazed at them as if they were the most interesting objects in the world. The milk upset his stomach, and often he changed his diaper every hour. Sonic had found it exhausting, grown to learn that the mothers on TV were right that a baby was a lot of work, and like a story, he tried to feed it with words and encouragement and courage and effort, but the baby still found things to be sad and sorrowful, and often couldn't find anything to be happy about. A clinically depressed infant, was there such a thing?

The baby sat quietly in those rare moments, staring at nothing. Not interacting with the rattling toys or his quiet voice. His mother ran back and forth in the room next to him, venomously spitting out words that the baby was a "little shit" and he couldn't take care of him.

Sonic read in an article somewhere that babies often react to even arguments between family members and spouses unconsciously while sleeping, so he let the mother spit her poison and leave. The cobra couldn't make him lose this fight. He would do what he could as a brother. Keep him safe. Keep him happy. The cobra couldn't wrap the both of them with her long body and suffocate them slowly. The mother truly didn't know what was best for them.

Things became more stressful in those following months. Sonic had tried to juggle writing music (his newfound passion) and being with his few friends and making sure his mother didn't kill herself and the baby and nursing Blayze. The baby had often cried for very little reasons, and he grew mad with that madness his mother had, that he also wanted to thrust a knife in the baby's throat, so it couldn't cry anymore. His evil thoughts seeped into the pores of his mind, and he often had dreams of killing the baby, even throwing it in the microwave for half a minute to see what happens. His heart pained, panged, and sobbed as he thought these malicious things. He promised to take care of him. And he was becoming like his mother. A soon-to-be reality he never wanted to realize, but had soon grown over the years. After the trials of Blayze, he grew bitter; his mother never seemed to want to acknowledge the whole thing had happened. The child was his responsibility, he was the guardian that tried to shield him away from his wicked witch and bitch of a mother, but his heart had sobbed again, soon stopped beating a single cell of care and love into his husked heart, and he tried to keep the child off his mind too, but he could never forgive himself. Forgiving himself would mean that it was an okay thing that happened, he said. And it never was. The child was dead, and he had done the best he could for him, even brought the dead, cold body of the infant to the doctor asking if he could perform his voodoo magic to bring him to life, and the doctor said in the 21st century while the nurse overheard him in the white, cold room, "we don't perform any of that nigger magic here. Get out."

The morticians said that Blayze had died of unknown causes. SIDS, they called it.

They played with his brain. They tore through his heart and lungs, the baby that once was human, now a meal for people who constantly played with the dead. They said the child also had grown developing signs of autism. Sonic believed that Blayze would soon be murdered by his mother in the next few years anyways, as autism was something that the mother couldn't handle. She claimed that even when he was a baby that he seemed almost "autistic" and it made her want to slap him sometimes, but psychologists told him he had no signs of that "neurological disease", but it left him to wonder of what would happen if he survived, if his mother had never interrupted his life with discord and the possible murder of the infant (he couldn't doubt it), if his brother would end up conforming to society's standards, had grown to be a normal, well-adjusted boy. The psychologist had spoken illy of autism, which it was a disease that would soon infect millions of boys and girls, with the injections of mercury that were disguised as vaccines, and that many people injected with that "so-called vaccine" would leave destruction and empty bank accounts and resources absorbed and consumed through their families that were normal, well-adjusted. He wondered if his brother would change the minds of those like the psychologist, who could love him and understand he was still a boy. A hedgehog who could still love despite his depicted and caricatured cold, sociopathic brain. He asked why he thought autistic people were sick and severely feared among the community, and he replied that his son was autistic and he never left home and often stayed in one room and could never believe in a god with rationale like his cause he also had Downs Syndrome. And Sonic left, never speaking to the psychologist again. He soon showed up in a newspaper article being arrested for killing his son with rat poison, and he never heard of what happened to him after that. He assumed he was eternally imprisoned. He hoped so, at least.

It was the only time he went to a psychologist. He never trusted another one to diagnose him, to help his ailing heart after Blayze's death. His mother tried to get him to take ADHD medication before, but he often distributed it in the middle school playground to children who also smoked pot in the boiler room when the teachers weren't looking. They gave him around five dollars for each pill, which was enough to buy alcohol.

"Are you really old enough to buy alcohol, sweetheart?"

The woman wore red lipstick like her mother's, but she was overweight, had breasts that hung like pendulums, and he thought not a single man would ever find this woman attractive enough to fuck. At least she was kind. Kindness went a long way in life, he still believed, as he gave her a kiss on the cheek and told her she looked pretty and listened to her insignificant problems about other women and men she didn't like, and she often gave him the alcohol without even seeing a fake ID he stole from a man's wallet when he slept on the park bench.

He bought a pack of Corona and a couple shot bottles of vodka with the medication his mother was supposed to administer like an overbearing, childish nurse, as she frowned sharply and wondered why Sonic was not taking his medication.

"I don't like it," he stated flatly.

"There's two little yellow pills in that fluted cup, Sonic." She sounded bitter, petulant. Her lips were stained blood against the supposed white cotton scrubs that all nurses were supposed to wear, with the Red Cross worn proudly on their heads, the syringe that was never used after the 1930's held defiantly in her hand, ready to give the shot straight up his ass.

"I don't want it," he said.

"Take it. Take it, or else we're going to give you a little shot in the bum. And you won't like that, will you, sweetie?"

And he stormed through the fiery red glowing walls, as the nurses had restrained him with leather restraints that looked like they were used in the 1960's, and they had the syringes ready to be inserted in his ass cheeks, telling him he needed to be calm, he needed to be obedient so the nurses didn't had to do this again, so they could take care of the other patients in the ward, the ones who pissed on the couches while the female patients gossiped and had sex with the other female patients in the ward's bathrooms, the concrete-walled, steel-latrine eyesores that he wondered if Belham was really a bad hospital despite it looking like a hotel room than a mental hospital, as the patients often ate food in tubes and pissed in long streams on the floor and had often walked back and forth screaming and flipping the bird to the other doctors and nurses and threatening to burn the place down. They often were drugged, put in leather restraints, and sent to the Seclusion Room where he had nothing but cotton walls to talk to. They looked like praying angels when he was injected with that Haldol. They sunk their metal teeth into him. The ladies of mercy, how wonderful were they when they gave him the liquor of salvation, the liquid love he so wished to attain, the one his mother gave him, so long ago.

The patients continued to scream in long, hollow, serpentine shouts. Red was all he could see. The hospital was entirely encased in a red shell, as the patients got ready to eat the pig intestines that were laid out to them, the cannibal swines they were, the fangs of the nurses ready to strike if they never ate anything, the anorectics like him having food tunneling down his throat. Mercy me! The nurses shouted. It's time for your medications! The leather restraints were pushed down against him like a million oppressing hands, the liquor of the Haldol traveling to his nervous system, and dowsed with Librium, as the nurses gathered around and discussed his issues. Schizophrenic? Possibly. Very strong possibility of being schizophrenic…delusional disorder…secrets that he kept to himself in so long…alcoholic…Mommy issues…His eyes dilated as the drug had suffocated him and drained him of all his strength. His eyes were slowly lulled, as he remembered his mother once loving him, the mother with the ruby painted nails and the blue cobalt eyes and her lips, pursed together to kiss him, take him away from all of this madness. He was sick, and tired, and he wanted the hospital to clean him up, make him sober, make him safe and sane. He wished for it, but never did it come to him in all of his 24 years of life.

_Am I really mad? Am I really insane? _One patient asked.

_Why yes, yes you are, _a doctor replied.

_But let me tell you a secret, _she said.

_All the best people are._

Bittersweet was his romance with Haldol. He could lick up the liquid with a spoon, under a burning wick of a cigarette lighter. The gods have never given him such a loving guise, a loving mother in the form of a drug. His insanity disappeared and only his sadness and numbness remained. Falling asleep under the pitcher of clocks, the ticking droning on monotonously as the patients lined up to get their morning meds. He was still fatigued, and he wished to rest again in the Seclusion Room. God help him, he only wanted to sleep his life away.

_Carl…Jackson…Lepton…Candace…Find Candace for me…Bind Candace for me, so she can take her pills…Bind them all, I said. It doesn't matter. I need them to take their medicine. Shit, I'm only paid to give them a fluted cup that has a bunch of multi-colored pills and they're supposed to take that to stay sane. Do you think I'm sane? I don't know either. Lord knows I'm not the only one…Sonic, yes Sonic dear, come and take your medicine._

He gazed into the latrine, seeing the smooth silver, the clear veil of water, as they said to him to take a bath, he hasn't taken one in several months.

Rub a dub, they said. Don't worry, no monsters will hurt you.

He stepped in. He felt he would slip, the smooth gullet of the monster ready to swallow him in. They had their hoses, their shampoo, and they told him to clean himself thoroughly, otherwise they would go through this spiel, everyday.

The medicine stared at him. They expected to be swallowed by a greedy little monster so quickly. But Sonic was never greedy. He wasn't even hungry. The pills that once were people didn't seem so appetizing to him.

Take your medicine, Sonic, they said. Else we'll inject it into you. And I don't think you'll like that very much.

Belham taught Bible classes in the morning, every weekday. He wanted to go, cause he wanted to have some faith in his God-fearing heart. The nurses tried to teach him about Jonah and the whale, about the Three Wisemen, about Jesus and his ability to cure everyone of their ailments, he asked if Jesus could cure him of his supposed mental illness and the nurses just laughed.

"It's all physical, darling," she said.

"I'm sure this schizophrenia is worse than leprosy. Would Jesus cure me if I prayed to him enough? If I believe in all your soft lies? They're soft because they're comforts, like a pillow when you fall asleep at night. But soon, you'll be sleeping on a rock, on a bent arm, because no one can save you, because I know no one can save me, except myself, and I'm 'incapacitated' (your words, nurses) by your pills. You're making me sick. You want me to die here. You want me to be the sacrifice to your pig god. All of you are pigs, is that right? I see your snouts ready to sniff me and your jowls ready to kill me; you are pigs, swine, lowly farm stock…"

"This isn't Orwell's Animal Farm, Sonic. Recite your Serenity prayer and go back to the dayroom to do some activities. You're finished. You don't get the grace of God today."

The grace of God. Like a cookie a child was never given, but was promised if he was "good". God blessed only those who were deemed worthy. And his fur, matted, dirty, smelling like a swine himself, God considered him too sick to go to his precious kingdom. The one that was immaculate like a pearl, like 24 karat gold. And as he walked to the dayroom, he watched all the other swine walk out of the room, with their smiles so clear and so white with their dental holes and their dental chips, that he often wondered if God loved imperfection as much as he did. Cause, after all, he loved his mother.

He did nothing in the dayroom, but watch the clocks tick by, while the other swine ate their grub, watched their movies and played their childish board games, Lord have mercy on these swines, as they are devout followers, while Sonic himself was only a sick android, as the wires and electricity ran through him, the plastic knife cutting through the holes in his plasticity to see that he was none other than a machine made in the age of the swines. The pigs have created their own dictatorship and were able to create a future with malfunctioning machines such as himself.

He was sent to the Seclusion Room again, with the million hands pinioning him down, the nurses gawking at him through the screen windows, and the cold! The arcticity of the room chilled him, if the leather straps weren't warming enough, as if he was loved by his own mother, the maiden of the candlelight, the waxy womb he was born from, as the stalactites of the room surrounded him like jaws, fangs of the hospital, and he could feel the earthenware tongue, and the bats hanging like crevasses and accentuates that made the cave feel like home. He bit through the tongue, to make it bleed and to make it die with his own red mouth, but it only sighed in relief, and he could feel his machinations malfunction, the ghost in the machine that only wished to die after he made his supposed mother bite the bucket.

He truly didn't want to be here.

_You were caught kissing other girls again, were you Guinevere?_

_No, I had sex with them. That's it. You don't have to act like this is some innocent childish trend I'm setting. I kissed her, and I fucked her. That's all you need to hear._

The other patients were playing an N64 game on a big screen television. He hit the other patient in the head with the N64 controller, causing him to bleed profusely. He flipped the other patients off, smiled with his rotten yellow teeth, and then pissed the couch underneath his cottony blue scrubs. Most of the patients here pissed themselves. He knew he was probably one of them, being as drunk on drugs as he was.

The tube feeders were like fish, eating mostly rocks to get some nutrition, until they found a fragment of fish shit and ate it trying to survive. The doctors rarely cleaned the tank. They ate fish shit all the time. They continued to eat from the tubes that were colored exactly like fish shit. It tasted like fish shit. Sonic wondered how far he had to go before he ate pink fragments that floated in the air and was savagely torn apart by other fishes. No small colorful flakes of food ever fell in the tank. Just shit, their only source of nutrition, and seaglass rocks.

The man was highly addicted to crack, going through a detox he never wanted to be a part of; kept interrupting the staff member with stories he experienced when he battled other druggies for one rock of cocaine. It was the only way he could ever feel again he said, so he left a scar across a man's eye and beat another one with a pipe unconscious.

_Man oh man I would never do that again…But for a rock of crack, I probably would. I probably would do it again. And you know what? You know, you know what? I can't quit crack! I can't quit the shit! Why did I need to go here? This is a violation, volition, a…_

He kept listening to the sounds of the cave as the monster breathed, the monster of Belham breathe out and gag out its worries. It suddenly became warm inside the cave, as he was given a warm injection of Haldol to cool himself. Nice warm mug of hot cocoa for the soul. He felt the good vibrations pass his body, as he could feel himself dying slowly again, until the world faded in his vision, and his arm recovered with all the black scars, becoming nothing but a piece of plasticine and rubber and metallic bones and wires. This machine had the power to regenerate its injuries like a starfish, like a lizard that lost its tail. He laid softly in his little cocoon and listened to the sounds of the cave undulate, breathe, hear the heart slowly thunder out in his head, then he heard nurses again, whispering his name, the doctors that were rolling him out like a nice little package for the patients to open, as he fell asleep in his dead mother's arms.

He didn't remember much from his venture to Belham. He apparently wasted three months of his life in the care of doctors who claimed they would save him from God's little flaw-machine. He was prescribed a toxin and a cocktail of medications that were now proved to be ineffectual and outdated. The dark red and brown colors seemed to remind him of how sick he was, the deep earthy brown meaning he needed urgent care.

His father was nowhere to be found. He could be dead. He could be avoiding that his son was sick and needed help. He avoided that his wife was dead for so long. He once had a period in his life where he tried to find him, tried to tell him that he needed a place to stay, he needed to get away from this crazy day program that a hospital similar to Belham was offering.

He was there for the day, trying to entertain himself and learn ways he could "cope" with his mental illness (but had said nothing about God or religion, or nothing at all about schizophrenia, his supposed diagnosis). The diagnoses were simply "Mental Illness NOS". There was no indication of what they were suffering from. Bipolar didn't exist in this hospital. Or delusions or paranoia or hallucinations. They were just "sick". And they were told they were all "special" and "unique". But at the end of the day, Sonic had felt useless and dried up and used. Because at night, he was homeless. It was only his temporary homeless shelter.

Did they ever give him a home? Any resources? It was a strange day program, never giving him any direction in his life. They simply stated he was "sick", and he had strange "fixations" on his past that he "needed to let go". So did many other patients who were traumatized from their past, and many of them lead the way into suicide. As much as he thought of it, he knew it was something he couldn't do. Cause there were people who needed him. Like Tails. He was off at a friend's home, promising that he would be taken care of while he got treatment. He never expected months, however, and his friend still assumed he was being treated for the death of his mother. He wanted to return to his home, possibly condemned, but something had beckoned him to stay in these facilities. They were…safe. They made him feel welcome to be abnormal. Their colors, their nurses that always greeted him with a smile, the fact that doctors kept trying to solve the puzzle of his sickness and make him feel better, it was something that made him feel good in those flames of his soul, the skull that wanted to vociferate kindness after the brain was treated harshly with alcohol. And he knew if he ever came back, he would drink again. Alcohol was everywhere. It was an abusive friend that always turned up in every corner. Advertisements. TV showed them all the time, except on Tails' children cartoons. They appeared in books. They appeared in with his friends, after they went out on a night of drinking. He couldn't stay sober when his mind clamored for a beer, for two, for three, for schnapps and vodka and cheap import beer if he was low on money. He would return to an old friend who secretly hated him. He didn't want to disappoint Tails. He often hid the alcohol, but it soon led to a point where he knew, and he didn't want to say anything about it. His daddy getting drunk again because his mother had taught him bad habits. His mother died because he couldn't help him. God died because He couldn't help him. Sonic only consumed Haldol via injection when he wished to numb the pain away, and fall to a deep sleep, freeing him from guilt.

The moon shone for him like a blue opal. He prayed every night, even if God was rotting in the grave underneath him, as after all, he was as mortal as we were. The flowers soon stopped blossoming. Ice began to grow in its small petals. Crystals surrounded in the air, had stiffened his nostrils full of the scent of burning wood and chimneys and roasting open fires as winter had soon overtaken the city. Snow had devoured Buffalo. It often snowed to the point where Sonic and the other patients were trapped in the dayroom and couldn't leave to do their nightly homeless binges. Sonic had begun to collect small things he found in dumpsters, and he was surprised that a variety of instruments were thrown away as if they had no value whatsoever. He gave them to the other patients, even to the ones who had no voice that was sealed away from post-traumatic abuse, and he told them the basics, that they could just blow into the dirty unwashed music makers and play out their heart while the winter still collected in their barely beating hearts. He strummed his guitar, following a steady chorus, while the rest stumbled with the keys, but the nurses and doctors gazed at them as they played their little song in the winter that collapsed them, and they were surprised at how much they opened up. They began to have lessons in the midst of group therapy and medication times, and soon, those patients that had their voice whited away were soon blue, red, yellow, and they could talk, and sing, and the doctors had claimed what a gift music was to make them want to live again, and Sonic has helped them, his therapy has attracted so many people, and soon, the entire dayroom was an orchestra as the doctors had bought instruments for them to play (and even giving some of the Chronics a triangle to play so they could feel they were a part of the band too), and doctors had advertisements playing on the radio and in the city streets, of having their patients play in a band, have the hospital gain some recognition and even some money, and help give them more resources and games and activities for the patients to participate in. Sonic was elated to play music again, his guitar sounding so fierce and so powerful during those moments in his life, when the cold was suffocating, when gods and pride were dead, and when Tails was off to another section of the city, might as well have been continents away. He wanted to make him proud. He wanted to make God proud. He wanted to make Blayze proud too.

The song continued to echo in his ear, by the vocal chords of the backup singers, as he played a song for his baby brother who never got to experience the golden light of his life, when his crazy mother was dead and his father went and fucked himself with his one finger, and doctors actually respected him and no longer thought he needed injections to listen and dark brown and earthenware pills to calm down.

_You are awake, and see the darkness,_

_The gemmed eyes of demons, you expect them to love you._

_The candlestick, the cavern that waits to consume you with_

_Breast-fed teeth…_

_The small wick melts in the tune of your eyes,_

_Groveling at the new scents of visions, the colors that people had grown_

_Sorrowful by._

_Blue._

_Chartreuse._

_You have seen the world in its ugly colors._

_The hospital walls melt like the candle._

_It dissolves into the spindly light._

_And you can hear the flame being tucked to sleep._

_With a small whisper of "ssh, ssh, ssh"._

Love. He felt it all over. From the nurses and doctors, from the other patients, from his fans as they said how inspiring it was for a mentally ill hedgehog to write songs about his dead autistic brother.

Sometimes he remembers those days in both the day program and the mental hospital fondly, even if Belham was a strange, if morbid institute, as he wished he could be rolled up like a flower bud again, shaped to whatever the doctors felt it was right, ready for him to bloom a bloody color. He soon left the day program, reluctantly, to come back to Tails to write music and to get an apartment with the leftover money the doctors allotted him during their small tours and their shows in coffee shops. It was enough to get a nice apartment, and he soon recorded music and made albums, the albums that once sold quickly, soon molassed to barely a sale in weeks, to a month. The popularity and pride was only short-lived, and his sobriety and his victory was also dead as quickly as a fly that just morphed from a maggot.

He had wings, but they barely kept him aloft. The sun was too hot, and melted them.

Miles was sick soon after. Then he drank much more than he used to. Then he found out God was even deader than he imagined. He was only a skeleton, and He haunted him, as he tried to sleep away the misery, like the Haldol that once streamed through his veins that have rocked him to sleep and gave him a goodnight kiss and a warm cup of milk.

He made it to work. A little late, but he never minded. Suicide still gnawed at him, a snake with latching fangs, and he saw Shadow dealing with a few more customers. Not much as last time, but it was still a change, he thought. The little girl was here again, with her cup of hot cocoa, her smile so glaringly white in the sun, her eyes the most precious of pearls…He knew he would have to wear the dress again, but this time, he didn't mind. She brought a few friends, and the girl had pointed at him and giggled, and the other girls peeped, wondering what was so special about him.

Love.

He would soon feel it all over again.

The girls' smiles were like gems. Shining in the mine for him to pick up with his fragile hands. Shadow pointed to the dress, as he recited his rejuvenation again. Tap together the Alice in Wonderland shoes and say a prayer, because the girls would soon be fascinated with you. You'll feel precious and admired again. Even if he thought he was nothing but a sack of shit who deserved to die.

God was still dead, he said. But would He like to be alive to see him be a respectable person for once.

He drank a small bottle of vodka, then went to work, his dress glimmering in the cafe's lights, the angel that was supposed to save the little girls, coming to take them away.

They doted on him. Touched his dress, how silky it was, asked him where he lived, and they brushed his fur, his embarrassment hiding his chuckles and purrs, but the love was there, and it was all he could ask for.

He could hear the other customers gaze up at him, wondering if he could entertain them, serve them. The depression was still there, he could still feel it festering in his small cold heart, but for as quiet as it was for a few hours, he felt it lift, and the red bloody walls and the uttering's of the beast inside the caverns of his mind was rested. He served them cappuccinos and mochas and plain black coffee, and the customers said that Shadow was probably busy at work trying to master the recipe that his father once had, because they tasted a little better than usual. No longer like hot cattle piss. It tasted like regular coffee. Not at all like Starbucks, but it tasted decent, enough to spend the 2 dollars for a cup.

He sat huddled in the booth of the cafe, as the girls held his hand and had told them that they thought he was cute, maybe the best thing to happen in the cafe.

"Rosie is 14 now," they said.

These girls were eight years old, seven, six. Why did Rosie had friends at a younger age than her? She should be in middle school, gossiping about boys and wearing lip gloss and talking about the strange developments that were taking place in her. But Rosie refused to grow up, because her childhood was maimed by her mother. The mother that stood looking oh-so-important, drinking a latte and trying to talk about how important her business was, how she took care of her child (with spankings and loud voices used to perfection) and her breasts were trying to claw out of her fur coat, as she believed she could send Rosie to Yale and have her be a biochemist like her father, who died of lung cancer a while back.

She was familiar. A shadow of Tails' parents.

Rosie held his hand tenderly, as her mother continued to talk about how much she loathed the public education system, dumbing down Rosie and making her be friends with near-kindergartners with the elementary school right next to this middle school. Something was wrong with that Rosie, she said. She never grew up. She still believed in fairies and magic and princesses as if she was only six. And Sonic held her, patted her on the back, and told her that was okay.

"But Mr. Sonic, my mom wants me to be a proper girl. She's so mean to me. She hurts me because I refuse to 'grow up'. She hurts me with drinking her red stuff too. It looks like blood, and I think my mom drinks blood sometimes. She's a vampire."

Sonic managed to stifle a small laugh, as he could sense the mother's sharp eyes stab at him from afar. The girl got closer to Sonic, hugging him as both their dresses touched, and he could feel sympathy for the little girl, as her childhood was taken away by her bitch of a mother, and she just wanted to live in it again. She never remembered being happy as a child, with her father ailing in health and her mother driven to rages over his carelessness and his callousness.

Her father drank too. And smoked cigars too often.

He was very intelligent, but never took good care of his health.

"I don't know. Sometimes I want my daddy back Mr. Sonic. Even if he drank blood a lot. Even if his room always stank. Even if I found bottles all over his room. He told me I was a good girl and I would be something someday. His breath smelled, but I thought it was comforting to hear him try to sing. Try to make me happy. Because my mother just screamed. She took me outside to the cold once, and made me sit there while she was in that warm home, reading magazines about how prestigious daddy was. Daddy soon died shortly after that. They had a big funeral for him. He died. And mommy was only there, telling me how she never wanted me in the first place, it was all daddy's idea, but daddy was drinking blood again. I don't know. I just wanted to tell you all that Mr. Sonic. Because I feel safe with you."

She pets him near his ears, brushing away the dirt that remained after his rejuvenation. Sonic's heart was worn out, old, but it beat strongly for the little girl, he could feel blood rushing to his body again, and he put aside a strand of black hair from her face and looked into her eyes, trying to reach an understanding that they would be friends, and he had more reasons to live other than Tails. This girl had looked up to him, the drunk he was, and if drinking from her mother and father made her life miserable, then it would make her miserable too. The sad little girl, looking for someone to hold her and love her.

Night soon bloomed. He sat with the girl while the mother continued to harp on things that truly weren't very important, intoxicated and wired by a few drinks of black coffee and a few lattes. She forgot about the girl and wanted to talk to the manager, completely enamored with the taste of their new coffee, her breasts pointing towards the workers, as sharp as her eyes. She coughed blood in her drink, and drank it anyways. She learned to not waste a good drink from her alcoholism. And it went with coffee too.

"Mommy's never proud of me, Sonic," she whispered.

Shadow was writing again in his novel, when he heard a knock on his door, hearing a drunken voice call out to him. It sounded feminine, so it couldn't be Sonic. The woman leaned on the sides of the door, her breath smelling of red digested wine. Her mouth had some foams of blood. Shadow had no desire to talk to her, especially in her drunken state, and as much as he sympathized with a few alcoholics, the woman was an annoyance, as her mouth had opened up in a bloody hole and she told him she wanted him to come to her house, to take care of her daughter, her little bitch she never wanted to take care of in the first place, and Shadow held the phone in his hand, telling her if she didn't leave the coffee shop he would call the police.

She vomited on the floor, and Shadow growled and sharply screamed. "Get the hell out of here!"

The girl was taken away from his hands, as the woman snatched her up in her avian claws, and told her they would never come to this coffee shop again, as the owner had something "firmly stuck up his ass".

His heart broke when he heard the engine of her Mercedes start up, and she pressed her foot on the gas pedal, hoping to never return, even with her daughter who was stuck in the age of six.

The love lasted as fleetingly as his band in the day program.

Shadow gave him the rest of her hot cocoa, his face seeming to be full of concern, and he told him to "drink it, and maybe that sorrow will pass".

The cold hot cocoa tasted bittersweet. It made him feel numb, a husk that was soon shed in the warm, wet night.

Haldol was the only thing that could make him forget.


	7. Chapter 7

Gray, silver-rimmed, the sky opened up with a mighty yawn. And so did Sonic, as his eyes were filmed, the tiredness beckoning him back to bed. He wished he could sleep again. Sleep forever. Sleep until time ended and he was alone in space. Sleeping, his heart slowly rising from the caverns, loving the little girl that left him, with the bitch mother taking care of her. Her breasts still pointed at him. And he hated it.

How ugly were they. The little lumps of ugly coal, in her black dress, trying to be formal. How disgusting was she? Her blood seeping from her mouth, her drinks mixing to her downfall, yet she seemed to have the perfect life. Her husband left her millions to eat off the table. She bought very nice things and tried to save up for her daughter to go to Yale (if she was good enough, she claimed). When his mother died he was left with nothing. She had no life insurance, and she had no fortune. Just leaving behind many bottles of vodka and whiskey and vomit boiling in her breath, in the house that was then condemned. Father never came back and fixed the mess. He left Sonic alone. But it didn't matter. He didn't know what his father's name was in all those years. He saw him a few times, but simply told him to take whatever money he gave him and have a nice meal with his old mother. Her nails were yellowing and decaying with the cigarette smoke in the air, and the flies that lie rotted in the Venetian blinds of the windows. The entire house was sticky, and despite its fancy furniture, the floorboards were falling apart, and the ceiling was due to fall at any moment due to the leak his father ignored for so long. He never got the address to where his father worked. He never learned how his mother and he even married. What did his father saw in his mother, Constance Sholl? And why did he leave Sonic Sholl all alone? And why did he never show a sign of sympathy when Blayze Sholl died by his Constance possibly murdering him and telling her friends that she lost a child? For short, his mother called herself "Candy Shell" and had often told men to lick her like an M&M. All he knew about his father was that his last name was Sholl, yet he never had hint of who he worked for. Sholl Industries? Sholl Incorporated? None of that was in Buffalo. Maybe he had a hidden life, living in New York and having a wife that was actually sane and attractive, while he only took care of his diseased mother because he felt he had some sort of moral obligation to take care of his last family. But that obligation wasn't enough. His father left without saying goodbye, a shadow that soon transferred to the darkness. He died a few years later, of a heart attack, with some implications of lung cancer from the many cigars he smoked.

He drove to work, after drinking some cheap import beer. He restricted himself to one. Two maybe. One and a half. Because he promised to not drink when he thought of Rosie. The girl who once loved him but soon disappeared, like his father.

Despite the slight intoxication, he felt a little happy. Maybe. He tried to remind himself that someone out there loved him, and she wore a dress like him. The afternoon was sickeningly humid, the air feeling wet, his forehead covered in sweat before he got inside the air-conditioned building. Shadow noticed more customers were coming, the men and women interested to see his dress. The dress that he began to believe was some sort of divine punishment from Shadow that would lead to some divine rediscovery. He was polite, cordial, as he served them the drinks and bagels and cinnamon rolls, feeling the heat seeping out of the windows and feeling warm and sickened with sweat with his fur that was drenched.

"Sonic, you look a little exhausted."

The other workers were beginning to open up to him. A little bit. Believing his dress was slightly magical. They gave him a bottle of water, and he swallowed it clean, rushing to serve the other customers. He also had to clean the tables while some people looked underneath his dress to see his pink silk underwear, he had to make sure the walls didn't decay and stink, the monsters underneath that brown wallpaper growling and wanting to be let free, to swallow their drink of blood and their meal of meat and bones, and he felt overwhelmed, all the things he needed to do, all the things he had to worry about, it was payday and he had to buy Tails treatments and for him to stay in the hospital he had to make sure to take care of himself make sure all the quills were cleaned and wash himself and redo the Marilyn Manson bathroom and mop the floors and hear the coworkers laugh at how sometimes his dress showed his undergarments and the shoes often weren't polished enough and mother was going to be sick if he didn't wash the dishes fast enough she would scream he would speak again and the spell would be broken…

Magic wasn't real, he told himself.

Mother didn't truly have any control over him. The spell was only a way for him to be quiet.

So he wouldn't be able to call 911 when she died. Or get her any help, for her illness and for child protective services to come and take him away. Would foster care be even worse than his mother? Would he tell everyone of his mother's eccentricities, the death of Blayze, how he could never truly forgive himself?

The spell was only broken when she died. Sonic had never said a word to her in all those years he was in her care. When he was a baby he often babbled in front of her, yet she could feel the sharp eyes gaze at him, the demon nails that reeked of acidic fire clamoring for his throat. The baby was soon quiet, and he rarely cried. Constance often said on how such a nice baby Sonic was, how easy he was to raise, but it was only to please her. To make her feel better that she was sick and would soon die under her bottles of liquor and her STD's and her expired cosmetics and her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder.

God bless her, the crazy bitch. God died when he was taken to Belham. He often wondered if he would see people like his mother there. The women there were only closet lesbians with sociopathic tendencies with some past diagnoses of bipolar and conduct disorders.

The sweat continued to flow, more water was drunk, and he listened to the sounds of cars rumbling outside the window, the customers feeling satisfied enough with their warm bellies full of coffee and cocoa that they left, hoping to return soon. The hedgehog in the dress seemed to work harder than usual, appear cuter than usual, and the women especially loved him, hugging him close. He was reminded of how his mother once hugged him close. Except the strong smell of alcohol and semen was never on him. The women had nice breaths, smelling of chamomile and lavender.

The dress was generally accepted by the coworkers. It brought customers. Sonic often tried to be a different person in them. He tried to hide the alcoholism. His sickness was hidden underneath the folds of silk and frills. The anxiety continued to seethe under his head, ready to boil at any time. Shadow didn't seem to be here. He was off on some kind of excursion, telling the coworkers he had big plans for the coffee shop now.

He wished to wipe away all the memories of his father's drunken design options. He thought the Mocha Lounge would have brand new attire, with someone using his creativity to make the place new, a clean pearl that will take men to their promised land of clouds and harps. Stone asked if it would be like heaven, and Shadow said that his cafe wouldn't be anything like a false promise just to make people believe in delusional deities.

Soon, the rush of customers vanished. Empty and deprived, the cafe only had a few people again, omitting Shadow. Sonic drank a hot cocoa, waiting for his boss to arrive with the new plans for the cafe. It seemed so long, staring at the sun and watching it go down into a bloody red, a bloody eye watching all of Buffalo lie awake.

"I'm sick, I know," Sonic said.

He imagined the sun was talking to him, gazing at him, nodding its one eyeball and staring at all of his flaws and imperfections. The doll had a few stitches. The vase was glued together by 10 year olds not wanting to get in trouble with their mother.

It was torpid, hot, the sun continued to speak to him, the one gushing hand reaching out for him, the voices declaiming that he will die soon if he didn't admit to the world of how much he was a fraud, and Tails would never be saved under his blankets of money, no matter how much Shadow paid him. The liquid lunch drenched his brain. He sipped his hot cocoa, the voices screaming.

_Throw your hot cocoa at Stone, the bastard._

_Tell Brenda you scraped a fuckton of gum from her and the next time she does that again she can chew on all the pieces at once._

_Tony is shitty. Fuck Tony. Tell him the hot cocoa he gave you tastes like shit._

It did.

The walls vibrated. He could hear monsters crawling through them. The teeth showed in the walls. The hearts bled through the brown, nicotine-stained shit-colored paint.

He needed a drink. He had enough of the rejuvenation. The cleansing wasn't enough to dissolve his mental illness.

_Mother gave me this mother gave me this mother gave me this mother gave me this mother gave me this…_

Schizophrenia was in his genes. There were rumors that his grandfather had it, before he shot himself. There were rumors that a cousin had it so severe that he couldn't take care of himself and had to have another relative watch him and bathe him and clothe him and make sure he didn't try to swallow pills or cut himself with razorblades. Mother was a drunk who dressed provocatively and strangely and was prone to fits of rage and sorrow, and she saw hallucinations like seeing a decapitated head roll off her bed. She screamed in the middle of the night and tried to cling to her husband, but he left her to do some work in New York. He never really did come back to talk to them about their pain.

Suddenly he felt he needed a cigarette, although he never smoked before and was usually against it. He bummed a cigar from Stone and sat outside the cafe, his mouth frothing with smoke that soon disappeared in the blue sky and the air that smelled like rain and sun and gasoline.

It hurt to see the spring go, he thought. Weather that was actually tolerable, not as if he had sex in a home with no air conditioning while wearing a sweater and living in Texas. Spring had gone by without as much as a goodbye. It was nice seeing the pink blossoms on the trees, seeing Tails happy, doing whatever they needed to get away from their past. Tails wasn't abused by his mother and father, but often had such high expectations that he sometimes wished to get away from it all. A pluses in all of his classes in his private institutions, not an A or lower. They expected him to have a genius-level intelligence, despite that he was only eight years old. They believed he was an indigo child that could speak to ghosts at times, and he thought maybe Rosemary and Ralph had collective delusions about their family. They believed their uncle could talk to ghosts, and they believed that their grandparents had some experiences with the supernatural. Of course, Sonic didn't believe in any of it, but he knew he would soon be delusional like them. The voices called them and told them to believe that the fairy tales he read to Tails were real. Think the flower that bled for the Beauty and the Beast would soon die in his heart, and he would become a beast too. Believing that Rumplestiltskin had killed Blayze. That the Sleeping Beauty he heard so much about was truly his mother, and she slept and slept and slept as the alcohol oozed through her.

She often wore sunglasses to hide from the doctors and cops, as much as she could, that she wasn't intoxicated. Her nails hid how dirty they were underneath that polished sheen. Her clothes hid her torn-up vagina, her breasts that she kept underneath the wraps of bandages that Sonic once saw were mangled, but her customers didn't care at all as long as they could get a piece of meat.

Her body hid shingles of bones, ready to fall off her carcass. They were the weak roof to her home. Her heart was never happy. It beat, lonely, hollowed up, inside the cage that couldn't protect it from the alcohol and the sadness his mother often had.

Had his mother ever been in an institution like him? Only once. And she managed to come out of it after three days. She was diagnosed with bipolar and delusional disorder, and they prescribed her a mood stabilizer and an anti-psychotic. She threw them away shortly after receiving them.

She called the pills "The Devil's Treatment". She swore her doctors once used shock treatment on her. Sonic had no recollection of the doctors doing such a thing, but she once lived in an age where they believed sending veins of electricity through your brain would fix you. Constance's mother once went through shock therapy for her untreatable depression, but she still lived on, despite the constant migraines and sleeping for as often as 16 hours a day. Her mother was also diagnosed with Sleeping Beauty syndrome, and her daughter had tried to wake her up to take her to school and look presentable to the class as she told them how much her mother was so hard-working (she wasn't. She was too sick to even work. Her father had abused her, she claimed, but Sonic had doubted it, as her father ended up killing himself by slicing his wrist with one of his butcher knifes and feeding his body to pigs. A farmer and a butcher who worked himself to death, making sure the pigs had enough food to survive, as they were pigs with steroids injected into them.), and she kept telling her to talk about her father, the man who was very hard-working, raising pigs and cutting their meat and selling them for a nice profit so they could eat every night.

"But he…made me…"

What this dark secret was, Sonic didn't know. But her mother rose from her sleeping chair and had screamed at her to leave her alone and let her sleep forever.

The Sleeping Beauty only slept for a few years, then her mother, while still depressed, no longer slept more than 16 hours. Still about 11 hours a night, but it was a start.

His grandfather was a mystery, he believed. Did he really abuse her? The rotten shell of the Truth inside her was never revealed to Sonic. She told him his grandfather was a disgusting man, who never cleaned his teeth and wore dentures at 22 years old, he only ate meat and candy at a young age, and he was always particular about his customers truly tasting his food. He once put tacks in his rib eye steaks, telling the consumer to truly taste it and not swallow the whole entire meat whole. The controversy of his meat landed on local news and the police threatened to shut down his entire butcher shop, but somehow (she hissed, always, on the "somehow"), the police agreed to keep his shop open as long as they investigate what truly goes inside his meat. Every couple years he secretly puts in tinfoil or pieces of metal or and had even put a razorblade in a container of his famous custard, and the police never had done a thing about it. They said her father was a good man, and never meant to harm anybody.

She believed her father had abused drugs and shared it with the police officers. Sometimes he injected some PCP into his slabs of meat and served it to the customers, but the police had told them they were only sick in the head and they should be sent to a psychiatric ward.

Unlike her father, she screeched, who truly deserved to be inside one for many years.

Were these stories true? Sonic thought while fucked-up grandparents bred fucked-up parents, these could be fabrications her mind made up to excuse her of her drunkenness and her insanity. All the family photos of her parents seemed alive and cheerful. He believed her mother was depressed, he met her and she never left her chair while carefully circling her fibromyalgia-fingers over the presents and she thanked Sonic for every one, even if they were only socks and sweaters that were two sizes too small. He was surprised her mother was relatively thin, but she often had a bad habit of eating many of the Christmas sweets and going to the bathroom frequently…There was a smidgen of vomit on her lips. Bulimia? She was offended at that single accusation and continued to gorge herself on peppermint brownies her daughter often was proud of making (and they were good, but she no longer makes them every Christmas).

How long did his mind wander while the shop closed? He often switched to one subject to the next while he thought. Another Kurt Vonnegut in the making, he said. Soon he would be trying to prove that Tramalfadorian's existed and he could travel to certain points of his life. He could even travel to the year his baby brother was born and consecutively died. So it goes. He could still remember him in his heart, so he still lived on, was the Tramalfadorian's philosophy.

Where was he getting to now? His mind continued to flow, bounce to other subjects, his brain couldn't calm down, and he tried to whistle to show that he was still alive, but so many parts of him were gone in different dimensions. The coworkers had tried to get him back, but the dress felt tight, suddenly, on his skin, the ribbons turned into snakes, the silk a river that flowed endlessly and onto the floor.

They said that Shadow was coming back. Shadow was coming! Yes, Shadow! And he brought a little friend! He held his head and tried to focus on the present.

Yes, the walls that were stained with nicotine. The pictures of various baseball athletes. The bathroom with Marilyn Manson's grotesque face. The coworkers gazing at him with concerned facades. He saw it all before. This was the place he was at. A coffee shop that seemed so entirely dependent on his success. This coffee shop. Shadow's coffee shop. Yes, yes.

Shadow had arrived on the doors that Sonic believed were insect wings, the little girl he saw yesterday pulling at his fingers. He felt the tiny tug, the girl who was 13 yet was still very young, the nymph that persuaded him to sit down with her, weave her dream magic over him and have dreams that would take him away from this ugly reality, the beasts in the walls still scratching and growling underneath his hands that ached with the burns he inflicted on himself.

"That 13-year-old girl is possibly our money-maker, Sonic," Shadow said.

Rosie ran her fingers through his quills, and he tried to stifle his purring as Shadow continued to speak to him, discussing the new plans for the coffee shop. Sonic was at the center of it all, the magic pill that would soon spread happiness to the dopamine agents of the coffee shop brain.

The purring ran thickly in his vibrated voice box, and Shadow had told Rosie to stop petting him, so he could listen, his face showing his gleaming fangs in the sodium light. The anger was beginning to get to him, his fists quivering like a star, but his anger was kept under control. After all, his father was an angry drunk. Everyone, including Rosie's and Sonic's, parents were raging alcoholics. Alcohol had ruled New York, and there were too many wino's that stormed through Buffalo.

"Sonic, I want you to paint the new colors for this coffee shop. Be our little designer, if you will. I want to get rid of everything my father left here. No more baseball stars, no more Marilyn Monroe and Marilyn Manson, and no more of this ugly brown and yellow. These wallpapers need to be replaced. I can smell the ashes and cigarette smoke off them. Also, enforce the No Smoking law that would be set here. And no very large latte's and cappuccino's and mocha's, we need to try to attempt to stay healthy around here…also, vegan options for a few of our customer's who can't stand to see a baby cow get tortured for our food, and start planning some poetry and music nights for our customers…Sonic, you can play a few instruments, right?"

"Yeah, well, I…"

"Good! Maybe you can advertise your album that way. And work with this little darling Rosie to make the cafe a nice place, won't you? For a 13-year-old, she is quite talented. She knows how to play instruments too, and she can make a mean Microsoft Excel sheet. In fact, I'm using one of her sheets right now, and she is quite intelligent for being stuck mentally at the age of…"

Sonic had said through his glances to not tell the girl her diagnosis of being incredibly immature for her age. It would break her, he claimed. It would make her realize maybe her mother was right to mistreat her, when truly she was incredibly vile for doing what she did to the coffee shop yesterday.

Rosie and Sonic were the star team in this coffee shop, as Shadow handed them a bucket of white paint, told them to do whatever they think would look right in the coffee shop, and he sighed once he shut the door to his office, typing more of his novel again. So many pages were wasted, as he believed that nothing ended up right for his middle passages. He never told anyone he was working on several novels at once, but he always started at the beginning, then wrote the ending, then went to work filling in the gaps between. And many people in his NaNoWriMo forums had thought him strange for doing so, but he thought they were only hacks anyways.

The white paint shined like an opal. Sonic wasn't sure if Shadow meant to paint the entire coffee shop white, even getting rid of the discolored brown and the ashy yellows. In a way, he missed those colors. He thought the mocha lounge had done well with a nice shade of chocolate brown. But he knew he wouldn't at all miss the baseball players and Marilyn's that occupied the bathrooms. Shadow's father had a strange taste for decorating, and it was possible that he made very drunken decisions when designing his coffee shop.

The paint appeared, bored, listless, the coffee shop appearing without life. Sonic had felt dead as the color, sliding on the coats, his hand feeling necrotic, while the little girl had wondered if there was something magical in the albicant color, the pearl that shined as brightly as her teeth. The fumes of the paint stifled his nostrils. Dying in a coffee shop, was it possible for him? The scent had left his brain dead, he splashed some of the color around the brown tar edges, and he believed it was a mistake, as brown was a holy color in India, the colors of cows, the white that appeared so dead for him, so fluorescent, the yellows soon decayed away, bled away, and he could still smell the monster that awaited him beneath the floorboards, the walls, the hungry beast that pried its jaws into his paintbrush and had made his arms and legs hurt, the sharp jolting stabs of pain. The monster crawled inside his mind, the monster of depression, and the paint was so pure, so innocent, and so ugly.

He never had felt disgusted at such a holy color in his life.

Was Rosie also innocent and pure and ugly? Her mother considered her ugly. And her mother was ugly. Yellow roses were the ugliest he believed, and Rosie was such a ray of sunshine, and yet people had considered her hideous because she never acted her age.

Could he paint her another color, besides yellow and white? Could he paint her a livid color of sea green? Sonic loved the color of sea foam. His mother, back when she was kind, once promised to take him to the beach in Coney Island, and it once was a sparkling sea full of careening seagulls and seashells collected on the shore and the waves that had licked at his feet. In his age, it was now polluted by the narcissistic New Yorker mentality, and he never saw the beach for what it was in its beauty.

He wanted to see light houses, he wanted to see the sunsets, he wanted to see starfishes in estuaries, and fishes greeting him and nipping at his body if he stayed completely still.

As much as he wanted to see a pink sunrise and a green sunset, it never happened.

His hands swelled with pain. He continued with the painting. His strokes became more elaborate as he thought of the memories where his mother once loved him, but had never given him his promises.

More cookies from her oven. She promised to make those special star-shaped cookies every year of his birthday that were so wonderful. She stopped after his eighth birthday. He considered it the year where his mother slowly went insane. She once said to the small, fragile Sonic that she would rather shoot herself in the head than make him those cookies anymore. She brought a black pistol, and she considered using it. His father appeared to intervene, and he took it away from her, crying on the floor, lashing with her pale, bloodied wrists, her eyes glaring at him and her teeth twisted to a whangdoodle smile, and her red sulfurous nails had transformed to tiger fists and she beat her husband, resulting in the woman who once was his lovely mother turned into a beast that just wanted to see her demise, be locked in a room with only an empty wooden floor and one lone window, vacant and small. His father soon called it the "Ward Room" every time his mother suddenly became mercuric and fluctuant.

There was soon a bed with two white pillows in the room, with the window completely locked and sealed with super glue. There was a small flap on the door that his father installed to feed the beast the few scraps of meat he had. He never gave her any alcohol, just steak and mashed potatoes and peas along with chicken and gravy and turkey. The Ward Room was soon only a dark family secret when his mother nearly died of a seizure inside the room, resulting in the separation papers soon delivered to his father's work. She saw him several times in her life, till he soon whittled away like dandelion fluffs in the spring wind.

She only married him for the money. She only had him as her child because that was the societal thing to do. Her eyes were in mascara for all of his childhood, until she soon never put on makeup and was only drowning herself in madness. The lady's red fingernail paint became an iodized brown, and her body wilted the more she succumbed to her alcoholism.

How much of this story did he need to repeat to himself? Did he regret the death of his mother he could've prevented? The phone might've not worked anyway. The phone lines might've been busy. There was a lot of crime in Buffalo that day. Father would've never come back and assisted her if she was alive. Throw more dollar bills at her and tell her to get well with his insurance.

If only his mother had the right medication instead of alcohol.

If only his mother had treatment.

He was partly to blame.

He hated her, yet loved her. Now she was gone, he missed her and couldn't stop thinking of her. She left her touch of disease on him and now he was just as sick, just as ill and destroyed and maimed.

"Sonic! The paint changed color!"

He gazed up at the sea foam paint that sparkled among all the customers that came and watched them paint. He remembered the color shining so fiercely in his heart, when he wanted to go to the beach back when his mother was once a saint, when the little girl he met he believed could see through his disgusting rot and see how he was a good hedgehog, willing to do anything for Tails and his supposed daughter. The sea green color made him happy, staring at it, imagining himself on the shores of Coney Island, with the little girl tagging along by holding onto his hand.

The dress also became a bright color of aquamarine. How it glowed so happily among the sun, the people who came and watched them have the sea trickle between their toes, having fresh Cokes and ice cream as the sun made it melt into a white liquid on their hands, the laughter and the seagull's crying ringing through the air, the beach's tinnitus and the beach's fever as the sun roasted the sand and made their bodies warm on that cloudy day.

The children came over and touched his dress, wondered if he was a lady, and he said no, but the dress made him quite popular. Rosie tried to shield herself from the sun by hiding underneath his dress, and he watched the sky turn into a sickly green, holding onto the sweating Coke and watching the seagulls fight over leftover burgers and smashed ice cream cones.

He daydreamed too deeply, watching the sun falling faster, the pink sun that glowed like a tiny gem in the sky.

"Sonic…"

The girl crawled underneath him, his ears pricking up on the sound of beasts crying, the bloody monsters that hid in the walls like rats waiting to scavenge every last part of his flesh, teeth that were silver instruments, the knifes and forks willing to split him apart. He tried to focus on the sun, see how pretty it shone, make sure the girl was safe underneath him, but he could still sense the beasts tearing out from underneath his skin. They infected his body, and they wanted to destroy everything inside him, including his heart and his trees that collected the air in the world, the sponge that absorbed information, the slabs of meat and the snake that shat out and devoured all who entered it.

"Sonic!"

The coffee shop was painted. The paint had made it into a glittering carcass of sea foam and brown, and he felt proud. Shadow took down the frames of the baseball players, and instead installed pictures of famous musicians and artists. Van Gogh, Picasso, Norah Jones, Michael Jackson, and a surprising lack of the Marilyn's. Manson was rarely seen, and Monroe only had a frame somewhat larger than the grotesque wrapped up body of Manson's. The chairs were made of beads, the sea blue and the neon green and the deep turquoise. The chairs seemed ornate, crafted from the loveliest jewels made for this place that Sonic begun to believe was slightly magical.

The customers loved it, and they said they would return for yet another round of coffee and cappuccino's and hot cocoas. Shadow sighed, overseeing that it was now closing time, and he could already feel money rolling in deep within his fingertips, like his father had always wanted, if he was still alive without getting the heart attack from his daily seven cups of coffee a day.

Rosie tugged at his dress. And she kissed him on the hand.

"I see you changed your attire. That color looks good on you."

He wasn't sure on how his dress turned sea foam. He just thought about the beach for a while, even imagining being there with Rosie and his dress suddenly was a chameleon and changed colors to its surroundings. How surprising, he thought. He wondered if his underwear could do that too.

"You've done a little better than I expected, Sonic. You managed to bring in a lot of customers, clean yourself up a bit, and even some of the coworkers are beginning to open up to you. I think that's quite a big achievement that deserves a good check."

Shadow sighed, his body rustling all of the sadness inside him. Something depressed him deeply. He expected it was over with what he had to deal with, with Tails being sick, with being home alone in a shitty apartment, with a little girl who loved him who hated to feel like growing up, it was all a melancholy situation, the body feeling more decayed the more he got to know him. His heart dried up like a fallen leaf in autumn. He couldn't admit that he admired him, even loved him, slightly. His hands shook. Inside the sweaty palms were about $1,600 dollars, something that could help Sonic pay for the treatments that Tails had to undergo with the doctors who despised him, get himself a new haircut and look for a new apartment if he truly wanted to.

He hated to see the money go. It wasn't because he didn't want to give Sonic the money he deserved.

Tears flowed through his red eyes. He was tired.

"Why are you crying?"

Shadow knew there was nothing he could answer the question with what would make sense to Sonic. He cut out about 3 dollars from his own pay and had a black coffee, returning to his seat where he wrote more of his novel. The novel that was so entirely useless to write. Nothing in it made sense. Nothing was really interesting or emotional in the novel. He felt numb reading it. He wanted to delete everything and start again, but the first draft was always known to be shitty and he promised himself to edit all the bad parts out once he was finished.

His father's portrait stared at him with syringe eyes.

He cried while typing.

Sonic wanted to take Rosie everywhere he went. The little girl smiled up at him and kept holding onto his hand like a lamprey that didn't want to suck his blood, but only wanted to drain his sadness. With the money, he could drive her up to Coney Island the next day and be at the beach, no matter how polluted it was now. The beaches of New York were still pretty, especially the closed off beach where the sand was nothing but grains of glass bottles, green and white and blue, and he wondered if that was exactly what his drinking problem would lead. That all the bottles that would soon be broken down and destroyed in his life would be transformed into something beautiful.

He ordered a cappuccino on the go, Rosie wanting him to never leave her. Sonic left the dress and he imagined he would wear it again tomorrow, and she could touch it with her nimble fingers all over again, and he smiled and promised her he would return and make the cafe even more beautiful than it was before. He would play his music that he hasn't performed in so many months, and little Rosie could have VIP access.

"Please don't leave Sonic, please don't leave…Shadow would have to take me back to my mommy, and I…don't like her. Please be my new mommy. Please."

He could hint the sadness in her eyes, in her voice. The tears were welled up, and she cried on Sonic's fur, wishing it was instead silk.

"I'll be back, Rosie. I'll try to make things better for you tomorrow. I really do promise that. I'll love you when the sun is pink and the sky is suddenly green. I'll love you when the sands turn green and white and blue. One day we can go to the beach. We can travel to California for the best beaches. We can go to Hawaii. We can go to Coney Island even I guess. I think there's some fun stuff to do there. You…need to be patient. Good things truly will come to those who wait."

She stomped her foot, the defiant look in her eyes reflected in Sonic's vision. "I've waited thirteen years for someone to love me. I know what you will do. You'll just spend all that money on the same stuff that keeps my mom loony. You'll be loony. You'll be just like my mom. You'll drink and drink until everything's black. I love you, Sonic. I don't want you to be loony."

He wished to say to her that he was already loony and was even in a loony bin, several years ago, but the little girl would never listen to his agonizing truths and instead listen to hopeful lies.

"I won't spend the money on drink. I promise. I'll try to get help. I really want to stop being this way for both you and Tails. Both of you don't deserve this. I might stop for…Shadow too."

He got in the car and started up the ignition. The little girl coughed as his car expelled gas, and she pointed at him before he drove away, saying, "Uncle Shadow does a lot for you! You better take good care of his heart! It can't take much more!"

Sonic stopped midway between his house, to a liquor store.

He bought the finest bottle of vodka he could afford. About three-hundred dollars worth.

He still felt sad and empty, and his heart continued to leak of rot.

His heart couldn't take much more either, yet he continued to self-inflict pain onto it. It was the only thing that made him feel anything.

He would rather feel sadness and emptiness than numbness.


	8. Chapter 8

Another bottle of gin. Another glass of whiskey. He drank until he soon saw darkness. The waves of the black ocean surrounded him, and wanted to swallow him deep into its abyssal depths. He looked at the beach his mother promised to take him on the Internet, and he laughed and clapped and played the videos that were recorded of his performance several years ago. He laughed, he thought it was all idiosyncratic; that he would be drinking after all these wonderful things had happened to him. He gulped more gin, more zinfandel wine, and he gathered more cups ready to be licked and gulped. The monster was him! He lived in the walls! He was the creature that would soon devour so many children! Licking the bones of the wine, the skeleton of the gin and the tonic, he drank till he thought he truly couldn't take anymore, and he vomited on his wood block floor and passed out with his head down in filth.

He had to arrive in the hospital in about twenty minutes, before visitation time was over.

He dreamed lucidly. He dreamed of his mother singing to him, crooning a song of the cow that jumped over the moon. The milk she gave him out of her kind breasts…veined like a fine white cheese, and the mother had smoked a cigarette when he went to bed, full of milk like a tired kitten. She relaxed, stretched her back and legs, and went to the fridge for a drink. Sonic believed he could dream within a dream, like a needlessly complicated movie had told him, but he watched his mother, smoking the fine white stick while the father sat in the lone chair on the bar, reading his daily newspaper. He always read the obituaries and the police reports. They were his favorite part of the paper.

He drank black coffee, his gums and teeth yellowed by his constant smoking of cigars. He read every line of what happened in the police report in the form of a question, trying to interest his wife on what happened in Buffalo. He was very interested, as his gray fingernails scanned each article, wet with newspaper print from the spilling of his coffee, and his thick brown mustache bobbed on his face, and his lips appeared red and puffy. As if he got into a fight with a criminal. Father told him sometimes of local street fights he won with his knife and gun.

"Hey, did you know that a police officer had to kill another pit bull today? It nearly killed a five-year-old child. Fuck pit bulls. Why do people have them?"

She didn't listen.

The lamp was sulfur yellow, as the cigarette bobbed in her lips like his father's mustache. Constance got out a bottle of Grey Goose Vodka. A luxury in the household. She spilled some of the lavish drink on the bar and swallowed it whole, a ravenous snake.

"Hey, did you know that a man just called the police because someone cheated him of his drug money? Dumbass."

She didn't listen.

She asked him if she could take the van again. "I got a few errands to run."

Some of her words slurred. There was no concern in his father's voice or face.

"Hey, did you know that someone was put in jail for prostitution? Who would want to have sex with a clown bag that's full of STDs and venereal diseases?"

She smiled. "You would."

Mulling it over, he turned the next page of his newspaper. He had no more news to give to his family, his christened stories he told every night to Sonic of the criminals that ran around the streets in this part of Buffalo, were done for the day.

"I only fucked you because I wanted to help you. I was too kind. And you used my kindness as a drug, and you get high off that like your alcohol."

What would it cost to slice off her one breast to this man, and one to Sonic?

The cigarette smoke made the walls more yellow and crisped. She tossed the hairbrush she was styling with towards the man, who preemptively caught it in midair, continuing to smack his red and bloodied lips.

Sonic somehow could catch the growing rustle of cancer in his father's lungs. The tobacco had made his lungs decayed, becoming dead tissue that the doctors could never revive, no matter how much money he shoved at them. His grin was always hideous, full of holes, his fingers small stubs that were still gray with newspaper meat, the nails bleeding from pricked cuticles.

"You never loved me. You only wanted me for the money. And I only wanted you because I gave a damn about you at one point. Me, so ugly now, so rich, and you, so beautiful, yet so white trash. I always wanted to love you fully like I used to in the past, but look at you now, dressing up for other men, wanting their money to buy gas station food and coffee and beer. When you could've just asked me to buy you a box of doughnuts and whatever else they sell at the gas station and continuously punch yourself in the face and gut. Remember that we were going to have a baby before Sonic but some asshole came over and made you have a miscarriage? What happened to that fetus? Why, you kept it in a jar, and you made sure to remember it all these years, when you could be focusing on Sonic. Oh poor Sonic. He'll end up like you one day. He sure drinks your fucking milk so goddamn fast and always wants more. He's four years old, and you still give him milk from your tits!"

Her tits were sacred. Hindus worshiped them, and the Greeks had thought of them as lone gods on those barren hills. Athena and Persephone.

Her schizophrenic thoughts had sped through her brain. She believed that Sonic's father wanted to put cyanide in her drinks, have the ignition drown her in carbon monoxide by a special mechanism in his brain, the government was ready to inject her with chemicals that would make her react like a snake, as she believed that she was truly reptilian in nature.

She liked the sun, she liked the heat on lone rocks, she liked her room to be a newborn baby pink, and she swore she ate a few mice a few times.

She may have even eaten Sonic's soul, as helpless as it was.

She hated her breasts, yet it was the only thing that gave her the money these days. They were sacred little beasts in her chest, and she wanted to one day order from her husband to just chop them off and serve them in a dish for Sonic. They gave liquor to him, but now she hated the liquor that gave her babies life. Sonic was the only one she meant to have. The other child, unnamed and unknown to her until the day she miscarried, held some kind of significance to her, that she could've fed that baby, she could've taken care of it, she could've loved it like her own, but she was only a mother to a strange hedgehog who was so innocent and so helpless that he barely knew that his mother was a drunk, that his father didn't care for him at all. Underneath those bandages were scars where she tried to take those breasts off, all the milk, all the life from her motherly body. She never was a mother, she told herself. She never was a father either. She was neither gender. She wanted no man and woman to touch her. Yet it was the only thing she could do to survive and to withstand the searing sarcasm and verbal abuse her husband had gave her. His bitter hatred towards her was never understood, yet he always said he wanted to help her. He married her to help her in the first place. He made many crude sexual remarks towards her so they can have their first child and try to be a happy American family with a white picket fence. Her first child was not his. It was from a man who raped her. Then another who felt cheated by her orgasming punched her repeatedly, killing the child. Sonic didn't even come to her womb until years later, which was her husband's child. And he probably prayed to God that the illegitimate child would die. His hatred glowed and shined through his veins after that. He often left her alone, doing his business trips, and often she tried to feed her sexual hunger by taking his van and driving all over the country. She wanted to fuck every man in the world, a few women if she could ever appear attractive enough. The women were smart, she believed. The men were hungry flies who would eat even shit a dog laid out on the sidewalk in the summer sun. They would eat out whatever piece of shit had appeared in their sight.

God never loved her. If He did, she would have a better body than this. She would have no breasts, no vagina, and no penis and no muscles either. She would be neither, and she would be incredibly bland and as gray as her husband's fingers and boring enough that the men would never come to her again. But she was given a somewhat well-endowed body, and the flies gathered and fucked her. She wished her honey supply would run out, the flies' milk would be given away like her breasts. Given to the children of the future. Sonic lying in his bed, sleeping, so peacefully, listening to the crickets sing a soothing lullaby for him to dream to.

He woke up.

In all that sanctimonious five minutes of dreaming, he was half-conscious, his chin covered with vomit and partially-digested milk. He cleaned himself up, his eyes still a glazed red, almost appearing maraschino, and his hand was still in a handmade cast, black and nearly infected. Tails would wonder what had happened to him, he also thought that Tails would be angry with him and not care. He only had some money left over to pay for his treatments, about four hundred dollars, and he hated himself, from the crevices of the snake that wrapped around his heart, he hated himself and he knew that Shadow would hate him, Tails would hate him, the doctors would criticize him again and say that he was exactly like his mother, like his father who soon died of a heart attack and possibly lung cancer. And boredom when the newspapers didn't give him anything else to read when they removed the police reports.

Sonic cleaned himself up the best he could, and drove off to the hospital.

_Would Tails still love me?_

_Would he realize how sick I am?_

_I need this beer. It's my bitter medicine. It's my bitter medicine that I need to help myself to. It makes me feel better about my life. It makes me feel so much better about mom. About dad. About the two brothers I never had…_

_Was it true she had a brother before me, dead before he could be truly alive?_

_And the fetus was still in a closet, collecting dust?_

_Why would my mother care about a child that truly wasn't hers?_

But he wasn't truly hers either, he thought. His father thought that having a baby would change his mother's mind about sex and prostituting and reliving the abuse she experienced in her mind repeatedly. She drank to soothe the demons inside of her. She drank because it felt right. Nothing else in this world ever made any sense to her. Why she even married a man like Sonic's father, and even had Sonic and treated him with the utmost kindness for the first few years, then abused him, it never made sense to her either. Her mind was cracked, full of holes, and she could never get anyone to fix them. It was broken porcelain. A broken angel statue that she could never afford to fix.

As broken as she was, she tried to use the alcohol as glue. The liquid always streamed through the cracks, and she continued to be her mercurial self. Angels wondered how she even became a guardian angel in the first place. Her stone hands, so worn, creased and sore, she looked much like a grandmother in her age.

Her hair already became silver in the light of the moon. Her lips became as red and as puffy as his father's.

He wondered about the baby her mother used to have inside her, until it died before she could murder it, before his father could murder it as it never was his…

He wondered what the infant looked like in his small vial. With his bruised eyes, his plum fingers and his knubbed feet. What would he look like fully developed? Would he grow up to be a brother he would love more than his mother? The more he learned of his past, the more he thought his mother was a witch, yet there was that sympathy, that pity, and that piousness. He wished he could've done something. Send her to a hospital that could help. Douse her beer with her medication. Make the Thorazine send her off to a deep sleep like it had done with him and the Haldol…

The liquid medicine that drowned him away more than the beer. Sometimes he wished he had it again. But he wouldn't be able to do anything with the Haldol. He would just sleep for years, sleep for decades. Like Constance's mother. He wished he had Sleeping Beauty syndrome. He wished he could die for a few years and come back to life, full of renewed vigor.

He drove up to the hospital. The sirens and the white and blue walls were back. He smelled the scent of Lysol and Clorox, the smell of geriatric shit and piss and the smell of medication lining up the walls, the syringes that were needle-nosed, like little mosquitoes perched on the walls, waiting to be injected into him and to drain away his blood. The Haldol that would grant him his Sleeping Beauty diagnosis, make him avoid everything in the world…

"Sonic…"

The doctors shook their heads. The bastard came back. Tails was so weak, so pale, so frail, so fragile and bony and like porcelain. His wrist still held the bracelet that told the doctors of his family doctor so limply, and he barely ate his dinner of mashed potatoes and meatloaf. The mosquitoes continued to hang from the walls. The chains and the whips and the Iron Maidens that they were torturing Miles with.

Even his fur became a lighter shade of blond. His eyes were a lipid color, nearly a garish blue, and the fox tried to sleep as Sonic walked into the door, holding the money in his hand. He hoped it could help with the treatments.

Leukemia was such an expensive disease. One that only Rosemary and Ralph could pay for, if they were still alive.

Could he just have the common cold? A cheaper disease? Even something like tuberculosis, something so outdated and infected so many famous writers that they coughed out blood on their final pages before being whispered away into the afterlife?

"That's selfish for you to think, Sonic. Four-hundred dollars is not enough to completely treat his illness. I bet you spent more drinking yourself to death than having your son live."

He wished the doctors could give all his life to his son and just have him die and have Tails able to live with someone else. Maybe not someone like Rosemary and Ralph, but no one like him as well. He was too pathetic, too disappointing as a father. Miles looked at his thin legs and his cold mashed potatoes that were as gray as the skies, raining thin droplets on the window. He could smell the scent of rain in the hospital, and he shivered, and so did Tails.

The doctor sighed. "But it's a start, at least. We'll try to do what we can with the money. But I hope you will bring more than this. This boy is getting sicker by the day, and we were discussing calling CPS so this boy could possibly get the right treatment under a better foster parent, or calling Medicaid to see if he applies. But obviously you care more about the alcohol and your own death than your son. You care more about following the footsteps of your mother."

He said nothing. The fist that contained the four-hundred dollar bills were shaking. The doctors could see rims and froths of vomit and blood on his lips. The stench of sweat and tears resonated throughout the room. Tails could even smell it, and the mosquitoes, also, could smell it.

_Tails, look at you. Just…look at you. You're so sick. You're an angel statue like my mother. You look so cracked, so aged, and I don't have the glue, the alcohol, the blood to fix you…_

"Sonic, just give us the money. We'll do the best we can."

His fist shook.

Tears brimmed in his eyes.

Tails wanted Sonic to look at him, see how close to death he was, see how close to death Sonic was, and decide that both of them shouldn't die when spring was beautiful just a while ago.

_Remember how the cherry blossoms bloomed outside? Remember when the sun used to shine so brightly? When it was warm, but not so hot, not so cold, and the birds came out of hiding and the animals came out of their burrows and the world seemed to be alive all over again? Remember how happy we were, Sonic? Remember how happy I was when Rosemary and Ralph died that last winter?_

_It's winter all over again, isn't it Sonic? It's so hot, but it's a searing winter, because our souls are cold, our bodies are dying like the trees outside; we're becoming as white as winter, and the sun is becoming green. My skin is so clammy, so pale, because for now I am winter, and you are becoming winter too. Anyone who is close to death is winter._

The trees looked bare outside, Sonic thought. They looked as if they realized that winter was coming, and they took their green clothes off and got ready to pose for their coffins and die.

Tails sputtered as he wrote his letter to Sonic. The cold made goosebumps rise in his skin. Sonic sat on a chair, gazing at the many syringes in the corners, the sirens with their large breasts wishing for him to drink them like gauntlets.

_These women want you to take them. They want their breasts drunk. Because they know about you and your mother. You still love your mother. You can't deny it. You have a love-hate relationship with her. You loved her because she killed everything she touched. You are in love with death. You are in love with winter._

_No Tails, I hated her. I always hated winter and loved spring._

_The alcohol says otherwise._

_Why do you think I'm lying?_

The pens continued to scribble down notes between the hedgehog and fox. Tails had cast a spell over him too. They would only speak with yellow sticky notes, and the notes stuck around the blue walls. The bare trees that showed off their bodies to the summer that was soon walking away were covered by the notes. Sonic couldn't bear to look at them anymore.

_Fuck the trees._

_They're dying._

_I know that._

_They're dying like the both of us._

_I'm not going to die, and neither are you._

_You will the more you drink._

_Leave my drinking out of this._

_You want to die like your mother._

_I hate her._

_You don't, Sonic. Don't lie to me. It isn't going to work._

_She hated me. So I hate her too._

_She loved you in the beginning. And those memories are what you're holding onto._

_Tails, don't even get into my head. You know those things about my mother were a lie._

_You still wished she was here. You still wished you helped her. But you really wanted her to die because you felt bad for her._

_I wanted her to die because I hated her._

_Sonic…_

_What?_

_The doctors are telling you to leave. I can't change the rules. You have to go._

The four-hundred dollars were gone. The notes still remained on the walls and windows of Tails' room. The doctors told him to turn around so they can give him an injection.

_What is this Tails? This isn't a mental hospital!_

_What are you talking about?_

_Haldol. It's the fucking Haldol again. I fucking knew it._

_Sonic, you're…_

Sonic stormed out of the hallways, his body feeling sore, the vomit bubbling in his chest. The doctors and sirens kept telling him he needed to lie on a bed to give him a treatment. He believed he would be crucified like Christ.

More sticky notes appeared in the hospital.

_What is he talking about?_

_We're just going to give him an injection…_

_He needs to relax. That's all we're going to do to him._

_He's no Jesus._

_He's more of a Judas, to be honest._

The mosquitoes began to fly, the butterfly needles flapped their glass wings and thirsted for his blood.

The mosquito needles crawled on him, trying to insert their nozzle into his veins. He slapped them away, broke the plastic and glass between his fingers, the small splashes of blood dripping from his fingertips.

_I didn't want help from you. I wanted help for Tails. But then he kept talking about how we were winter, that we were dying. Do you believe I'm dying like Christ? Do you believe I'll come back like spring? It's going to be Easter in this hospital, won't it? You keep wanting my blood, and for what? To make a transfusion for Tails? I don't think we're the same blood type, and you keep wanting to kill me so Tails will live. That's what I always wanted, and now you're giving that to me._

_Hold still, Sonic…_

_You need to calm down…_

_Is he rambling, doctor?_

_He's just like his mother…_

_Don't even mention that bitch. Before she died she was forbidden from ever entering these premises…_

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…_

_What?_

_What are you doing to your wrists?_

_I'm crucifying myself._

_You can't do that, you fucking idiot!_

_Such red language._

_What do you mean red?_

_That was yellow. Questions are yellow._

_What about ellipsis…_

_Those are blue._

_Statements._

_Green. Green like my father's eyes._

_You are insane, Sonic! Now all of a sudden you're talking about colors! When this has nothing to do with anything! What did your mother take for her illness anyways? Thorazine? Haldol? Lobotomies?_

_Is that what you're giving me?_

_We might as well! Seeing how crazy you are! I'd rather have you like the Kennedy's daughter than like your mother!_

He drove a stake through one of his wrists.

He screamed.

_Hold still Sonic, this won't hurt…_

They were demons, like the ones sitting on his body with their thorny asses! The stakes were held aloft in the air, as the sirens urged him to suck on their breasts, their tails glistening in the winter sun, the trees whispering through the wind that winter was coming, it was coming to make him dead and to join the ranks with his mother, who was rotting in the ground next to all the Christmas trees that people put up to express how much joy they had in their hearts towards Jesus…

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…_

_We're going to put three more into you, maybe one into your brain too if you keep acting up._

He screamed as much as his voice box could allow. He felt every single blood cell in his body shake as the second stake was driven through his wrist, and he puked on the operating table. The doctors and nurses didn't clean it up, and didn't seem to care about his suffering or Tails'.

The demons continue to cackle, continue to thrust into his body, and he felt so much pain into his body, he felt all of his bones breaking and being ground into dust. The blood seeped from the operating table and onto the hospital floor, while Tails watched, with overwhelming sorrow and tears into his gray eyes.

_Here comes another one!_

A stake was driven into his leg.

He had no more energy to scream. Only a weak whimper could escape through his lips.

_Look how many sticky notes are filling up this hospital…_

_We're going to tell everyone how we crucified this son of a bitch…_

_More like he's the son of an insane Goddess._

_God is that Goddess. God is that bitch who drank herself to death. _

_God died on December 24th, 1999…_

_God died because Sonic felt oh so bad for her…_

_He decided to let her die because it was a mercy death. So while vomit going down the lungs is an embarrassing death God, remember: he felt bad for you._

_What a good son._

_Jesus was a good son when he died. (Giggle.)_

_What about the Holy Ghost?_

_What about him?_

_He died of a heart attack. He had very little love in his heart. No one truly loved him. So he died of a heart attack._

_He loved God, but not enough to keep Her from drinking!_

They drove the final stake through his other leg, and Sonic uttered no response.

His lips were quiet, and vomit and blood seeped from them. The nurses and doctors retained their normal forms, and they let Tails gaze at their prize.

_Look at Jesus, Judas…Look at Jesus…_

_Look at him all ready to be framed like a picture. Like an overzealous grandmother who believes God will make her live forever…_

_But God is already dead, my friend._

_She's always been dead. Since 1999…_

The operating table rolled from the room, where they kept their lobotomies and electroshock and hydrotherapy machines and Sonic was given a Haldol pill that he swallowed gratefully in his scarred throat, allowing his body to fester and rot away in the cold winter night.

He fell asleep. He curled up with all of the blood he shed away for all of his believers in his mother, and he was taken to a hospital, to Belham.

"Sonic."

Shadow's red eyes appeared even more tired than before. He drank too much coffee in his Mocha Lounge, trying to keep himself up worrying about Sonic. Not worrying about Sonic would mean he was selfish and he didn't at all care about him. The Lounge, when he spread his magic all over it, would lose money over his stupidity, his insanity, his selfishness and the fact that he couldn't let go of his mother, the genes that she bestowed upon him.

"Sonic, explain this please."

He couldn't.

There was nothing at all that he could explain. The stakes he used to slash his wrists, the butterfly needles he stuck inside his body, Tails witnessed it all, the crucifying of this beautiful Christ with his syringe crown and blood and vomit pouring from his body like an ugly and violent waterfall seen in a schizophrenic's dreams.

His mother's dreams.

His dreams.

"Explain it. Please. I'm trying to be polite."

His voice was broken and shattered. He tried to speak with the last few glass shards in his lungs, but nothing had come out. Ever since he loved his mother and never wanted to break the spell to speak to her. Mother mother, quite contraire, did I love her thru' the fair…

Her breasts still appeared ripe to him. The blue veined udder ready to secrete life into him.

Many thoughts swarmed in his head. He felt he couldn't focus, as the bitch began to talk to him in his head, as Shadow stared onward with his bloody-ripe eyes.

_You worthless monster…I told you to never speak of me again! Did we agree on that pact, that when I died, you will never mention my name? Constance. That isn't my name. It's Candy, and you know it. Not only is it Candy but it's also Sugartits and Lollipop and Saccharine Sweet. You know those names well, and to hear you abuse my presence with the name that my father gave me…_

"Sonic are you listening to me? What the hell is wrong with you?"

He didn't want to say anything. His mother tried to weave the spell, but he had to mention his head being home to thousands of talking voices, ones that believed that his head was an apartment, where he heard children crying and arguing couples and dogs barking and telephones ringing and the landlord reminding everyone to pay their dues. The skeletal structure of his head was home to a lone light bulb that swung while all these auditory personas lived, and they mostly fought, while Sonic collected nothing from them stationing inside. Just turmoil and anxiety and insanity.

"My mother is talking to me," he said. "She's talking to me, and so are many other people. They're telling me that maybe…maybe I should just die. I'm not worthy to be in here, Shadow, in this place of gods."

The rain padded on the panes of the barred windows. The light increasingly became dimmer the more they talked of these dark subjects, as the other patients grew solitary, defiant, and bored. The puzzles were always drooled over, the piss streamed down in small vials on their legs, the nurses became overbearing mothers with large breasts and fluted cups telling them to take multi-colored pills, and Sonic sat dazed near Shadow, listening to the rain, constantly making sure he wasn't pissing himself in front of him. The medication he was on warned that he wouldn't be able to control his bladder, and he vacantly gazed at him with drool pouring from the side of his face. He was a tabula rasa ready to be inserted data from the nurses, that this poor little hedgehog named Sonic needed an antipsychotic mind with a dash of an antidepressant mind, along with mood-stabilizing capabilities and maybe some more pills along with it. He felt good. The Klonopin made him feel elevated, as if everything no longer mattered and it didn't matter if he appeared to be a brute savage in front of Shadow, a dignified writer who owned a mom-and-pop coffee shop just down the lane from Starbuck's. Most New Yorker's wanted to spend more than seven dollars on a cup of coffee. So Shadow's business was failing. Because of overindulgence and self-importance.

If only Sonic knew what that felt like, to be pious and selfish.

Mother told him he was selfish a long time ago. Shortly after that, she died. And he thought it was true. Selfishness was a passed-on gene by his father, who never convalesced love into his heart.

Thoughts came and went in his head. The thoughts were inserted by the government, the Hive Mind inside the hospital who told him that they would fix him up like a malfunctioning machine, and make him a toy that would play right for the children who would only snap his head off anyways. So wonderful, boys and girls were.

_Shut up!_

If only he could.

"You're hearing voices in your head, is that what you're telling me?"

Sonic's insanity seemed new to Shadow. He knew of his drunkenness, his strange attachment to his mother, the little girl who wanted to play with him and tell him everything would be better…

The doctors warned that Sonic could go through many symptoms of his detox. He often sweat, and the summer, despite the coldness inside the hospital's womb, he cried out that it was warm and he wanted it even colder than before. The womb submitted, and made it more like the arctic, while the lights looked as if they were icicles, ready to fall on their fragile, insane heads.

The hospital was blue, as blue as him, and Sonic told Shadow he thought of the hospital as a cold grotto, where all the fetuses not yet developed were put in. Like his brother, who died inside a closet undiscovered by society.

Sonic imagined his lids bruised and cold, his palms short and limbless, always praying for God to come back, to give him the wonderful milk of salvation.

The staff surrounded them, Shadow giving a forceful slap on Sonic's cheek, his lids stinging with tears, when he shouted, interrupted the other infants inside the womb, that he couldn't believe all of this had to happen to him. That he was actually a lunatic in a dress, someone who could've stabbed any of his customers because the voices had told him to, someone who could've been a creative genius but wasted all his efforts on his own destruction. The cheeks that his mother claimed were his best feature, red, sore, and enlarged, the staff treated it with a rag full of antiseptic. The injury wasn't life-threatening, neither did it cause a bleeding wound to sprout from his skin, but Sonic soaked in all the painkillers he could, and the Haldol they injected to keep the voices quiet inside his tumultuous head.

He wrapped himself up in a little cocoon, with the belts forcing him down on the bed, the songs from the children's ward singing so cheerfully throughout the cold night, as the Bitch continued to kiss him with her blue lips and promised him that if he was a good boy, she would let him out of his wound. But only if he was fixed by society, be shaped and willed by the Hive Mind, Big Mother, and he ate his pudding with his Klonopin and almost choked. They told him that he ate too fast, and now had to be fed through an intravenous tube.

_Fuck these people. Fuck Big Mother. Fuck the Bitch._

He didn't need to be fed through a tube like the ones in the wheelchairs. He didn't need to be reminded of the dangers of sex in the bathrooms by the lesbians who couldn't find a good man in their life who wasn't insane or doped up on pills. It rained outside, constantly, ever since he was admitted. He wanted to spread the barred windows aside and dance out there, and be happy, like Tails was when it was spring.

There was no spring anymore for Tails. There was only winter. As he became a dry, sunken yellow, all the moisture from his eyes becoming dust, and he slept in the blankets of the snow and the coffins of the bare trees, hoping that God could intervene in his death. It seemed more likely, as well, that Sonic would wilt away in time, and be frozen in the winter of the womb.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: This chapter…I'm not sure what I was going for, but I messed with the formatting in it in several parts to give a sort of hallucination to the reader that they're experiencing this madness and psychosis along with Sonic. This site doesn't allow it, so I can't show it. Guess you're going to have to imagine it.**

He cared more for that dress than he originally thought. The dress was him. It made him happy. It made him believe in a time where he was happy, for a little while. He missed the colors of it, the girl who made him believe that magic ruminated in the air by invisible fairies, and Shadow came by, and told him he wanted him to come back once he recovered, but he didn't want him to drink, anymore. To not end up like his father.

Sonic held the seagreen dress in his arms like it was a miscarried infant, and cried.

It was his brother, his missing sister, and he thought he killed yet another child in his existence.

The womb accommodated for all of its children. It opened up, and never let any of the patients out. The blue colors reminded Sonic of the sea. The water where Coney Island was once pristine. And his mother promised to take him there. So he can find out that his childhood wasn't wholly miserable.

The dress smelled like coffee and cappuccino. And he loved it like it was his own. It was his, it was his, it was his.

The doctors and nurses told him it was time for Shadow to go, for the womb to shut off all visitors from her crevices. Shadow held onto him, locked onto his ankles, told him to never leave him here, and he told him he had to stay, and he will return.

_So many people left me here, they never came back, Shadow…They left me at Belham, never came to visit me, and I want you, Shadow, I want you the most…_

He told him he would come back, and if not, he can be correctly labeled as a traitor. Sonic's hands felt nice, warm and soft, even the one that was burnt, badly scarred and treated with antiseptic and lotion…

He never wanted to let him go. But he knew he had to.

"Goodbye."

The womb was cold again, and it turned into an even darker shade of blue.

He sat in the grotto, holding onto his scarred body, and listened to his heartbeat, the sounds of the nurses and patients passing by him, the sounds of the carts carrying their lukewarm food…

They made Sonic only eat a dinner of meatloaf and peas and carrots. Nothing else, except with a cold cup of water with a sliver of ice.

Everyone else received more than that, even dessert.

And his food was the coldest, the meat still pink and raw, the peas and carrots still partially frozen.

_Can anyone in this Godforsaken place actually cook? This is still cold! And I'm not drinking ice cold water with ice cold food!_

He lifted the tray and threw it across the room, then threw up in the bathroom due to anxiety, his lovely Shadow leaving him…His lovely pearl, his lovely flower…Make his blood-scarred hands touch him and kiss him, make him feel alright in this futuristic hellhole, where they served translucent liquor to him with his pills.

He tossed and turned in his pink sheets and blankets, thinking about him.

He was as precious as a jewel. He was like an opal, shining in many different colors. He would serve him better food than cold meatloaf, he would give him the dress again, and he would be lovely and loved again, the dress shining like a tourmaline.

Did he really love him? His mother warned him about this kind of thing.

Love was dangerous, unkind, it would tear his heart into red, silk ribbons, but he couldn't ignore Shadow any longer, and his legs constantly twitched, his eyes were affixed to the ceiling, he remembered the collages he did of the teenage girl being pricked by needle-like eyes as everyone looked at her shabby fashion. And he believed that he looked like that girl, his shabbiness and his craziness and his drunkenness proudly displaying to everyone in the world, where he was then locked away, in a hospital that claimed would keep all the sane people out of her Glorious Womb, and they would be safe here, in their blue oceanic nursery.

He fell asleep.

—

They talked in group.

And Sonic felt he couldn't say much of anything.

It was the same situation as to why he was here. He was crazy. He was drunk. They were going to detox him again, and send him to a halfway house he would quit after a few days and go drinking again. The detox was the only way he could prevent dying from his withdrawal. And dying seemed like a viable option at this point. A patient was smoking a cigarette during group, needing to relieve stress of a post-traumatic incident, and she was sent to the same room that Sonic once was acquainted with, the room that helped him sleep off his Haldol, and would he love to sleep in it again, the room full of pillows, the room that he took comfort in as the medicine melted off his bones and skin.

More salve on the hand that was bitten by flames. He flinched, but it still wasn't the worst pain he felt. He still missed Shadow. And his heart hurt for him even more.

The monotony continued throughout the day. Cold breakfast. Cold lunch. Cold dinner. Everyone else had a warm meal. He had cardboard cutlery, while the rest had real silver spoons and knives, except for the woman who smoked a cigarette during group.

Ashy blond hair, with red lips, green eyes, and she always shook, nervous, smoking yet another cigarette and setting off an alarm in the hospital. They told her to smoke it during their designated cigarette breaks, but she claimed she needed one now. She was going through detox as well, and her veins throbbed and prodded throughout her body. Heroin addict. Of course, Sonic replied.

He was pretty sure for a time his mother probably used heroin too. Until she made the switch to alcohol, cause she claimed heroin was too expensive, and that alcohol was usually cheap and legal. She made the habit of drinking cheap import beers until she soon drank Russian vodkas and wines. She claimed she hated the taste of wine, but it was the quickest way to get wasted.

She didn't want to remember her pain anymore. Of why she hurt. Why her breasts were scarred. Why she felt her vagina wasn't alive and had seeped snakes.

It was what once happened to Eve, she felt, when she gave birth. She gave birth to evil.

Sonic craved a drink, but they only allowed him some juice and ice cold water. With only three ice cubes. Why three? He wasn't sure. Four meant he would die and the entire hospital would be destroyed. It was what the Japanese believed.

The woman tried to smoke a cigarette during a cold dinner again, and was once again restrained, and sent to a ward for people who they claimed were "disturbed". Sonic tried to be quiet, mind himself and eat his cold food and try to participate in therapy and wait till Shadow returned, and his heart still ached for him, and he once wrote tentative letters to him on the side of the dresser with a needle, and they never knew about it.

"Sonic, what do you think right now of your therapy?"

He stabbed his meal of gamy meat. It was supposed to be ribs, but seemed more shredded, a pulled pork type food, but it still collected bones and carapaces in its barbecued dress. And it tasted like shit.

"Sonic?"

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…_

The Sirens surrounded him.

Their needle-like fingers crevassed his skin, made small little slits in his fur.

"Sonic, we've noticed you haven't really made any strides in your therapy since you've been…"

The Sirens called him further, the sea and the sky crowing outside of the womb, the glass beach that was decorated with the green blue and white stones. Their ghastly-white teeth contained words, their tongues licked the air as they kept telling him of everything they would tell him if he joined them. He kept eating the pulled pork, despite obvious disgust lining his face.

"…in here. You were diagnosed with possible schizophrenia, maybe schizoaffective disorder. Did you know your mother once had this disorder? Before we…"

Yes.

They hurt her. They hurt her as much as she hurt Sonic.

They drove a stake through her eye and expected her behaviors to disappear. Or so that's what he believed for a few minutes, before they were led back to discussions about parental abuse, rape, and other traumas. Sonic thought he might have not had any. But they bit his bones, tore into his skin, they made him sick with the memory pills, the parasites that ate away at his brain.

Was it real? Was it ever truly real?

His mother wasn't alive because of these bastards.

He soon turned to his room, while the sun was a golden coin. It was being turned away, into a blue moon, the womb hiding him off from the world that he could love if he was alive again. For now, his eyes were bruised, he was pink and frail, and his hands were only flippers. Hedgehogs also didn't receive their quills until they soon were birthed and the air had hit his back.

They might as well have been icicles that were formed. He thought of himself s cold. It was his apathy, his alogia and anhedonia, the symptoms that all the doctors had warned him about. He seemed emotionally distant as he gazed at the moon, not realizing that in the hospital, it was one of the most beautiful things anyone could see. He didn't care. His heart couldn't react to the cold face of the woman who gazed out at him.

The Moon Maiden loved him, what a beautiful queen of the sky, but he even believed he had ataxia and atrophy, lying in bed for many hours, writing letters to people who were already dead or who didn't care at all to listen to him, his manic mouth.

He carved small, intricate letters, and watched as the other patients went outside in their pajama's and scrubs "taking a healthy, friendly walk", letting the world see how crazy they truly were, as one patient screamed "Skip to my loopy loo" and the women who feigned pregnancy and was often in hysterics when they told them she didn't have a child. Sonic was once treated like a child by these women for a few minutes before the staff found out and took her away to another room. She used the silver spoons to feed him a jar of applesauce she thieved from the lunch room, along with a side of baby carrots. It was about the only nutritious meal Sonic had for a long time.

When they took her away, he felt that longing for his mother, the bitch who he knew wasn't truly a bitch, just a sick, ill, incapacitated woman.

_Look at her, _the voices said.

_Look at her, how she's so dead inside._

She devoured her own drool, with the lunch of apple sauce and pudding and food smashed together and made into a tube into her stomach. Like Sonic was now, as the bitch nurses forced him to eat his meatloaf like a little child again, a mother bird regurgitating its worm for him.

_She's dead Sonic, don't you see?_

_Don't you see that she's dead?_

_It's time for her to die a second time. She needs a mercy-killing._

Her eye was swollen and sore, purple and bruised. She moved her hands an inch away from Sonic preparing the peas and carrots concoction of her baby food, showing him that she was hungry, an infant who wanted to be fed by her father bird. She gurgled, like a deranged, sick animal.

Belham was one of the only hospitals she's been to that said lobotomy would be the only thing to fix her.

Other hospitals moved past it.

But she was very ill. Very drunk, very schizophrenic. It was bound to be done.

Was this memory just simply an illusion? Sonic thought about it, as he wrote more love letters on the desk and dresser. He wrote one to Shadow, and wrote one to his mother.

_Dear Mother._

She ate through the tube, and she gurgled happily. The only sound Sonic knew she could make these days.

This memory wasn't real, he told himself. It never was. She was dead. Accept it, you piece of shit.

The voices kept talking to him. Culling him out of his letter.

_Dear My Brightest Sun._

She called him that, years ago.

If that was a real memory at all.

The alcohol made her poisoned with hate.

She wasn't always so crazy…

The candy she gave him wasn't always filled with thumbtacks.

She loved his older brother, when he was inside her.

The baby still screamed in his head.

Blayze grabbed him as he wrote, blood collecting on the carapaces of the letters.

_YOU MADE MOTHER FORGET ABOUT ME!_

_WHY DID SHE LOVE YOU MORE THAN ME?_

_Dear My Dreariest Day._

His brother was still alive, and so was his older brother, wrapped in pink, swaddled in womb-juice and attached to umbilical cords that kept them alive, their life support.

_Did you know that I'm the same as a flower?_

_If you pluck a flower, you put it in a vase full of water. This is the thing that keeps the flower alive for a little while. But eventually, it dies. Nothing can save the flower. Nothing can save us. You're coming with us, and you're going out of this womb with us until we die._

No, I can't, he said.

The flowers wilted slowly, minute by minute. Sonic could do nothing to stop it. The flowers kept crying for him to die with them. But he refused! They thought he was suicidal!

COME WITH US.

MOTHER WILL LOVE YOU.

LIKE SHE LOVED US, SONIC.

_Dear My Cornflower-Blue._

His mother said he was a cornflower blue, and it was her favorite color. She said he was sweeter than a mango, her favorite fruit. She said Sonic was the name given by adoring angels. She said she saw his name imprinted on forget-me-nots.

SHE CALLED YOU PRETTY THINGS AND WE WERE FORGOTTEN.

I WANT TO BE CALLED A CORNFLOWER.

A CERULEAN.

A PERIWINKLE.

WHY ARE YOU THE LUCKY ONE?

I WAS SIMPLY STRANGLED!

I WAS SIMPLY STRADDLED BY A MAN THEN KILLED.

The children hungered for him, they pulled him closer, and he could feel the womb pushing, the infants ready to be revealed to the doctors and nurses, the sirens of the sea.

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…_

They thrust their breasts into his mouth.

WHY DO YOU GET TO DRINK THE LIQUOR OF THE HEAVENLY MAIDENS?

WHY ARE YOU SO GODDAMN LUCKY?

Blood seeped in the flower's faces. The womb pushed further, and blood splashed in the blue canvas of the painting of the hospital room, the same one the hipster made, a week ago.

The red and blue. It made a beautiful centerpiece in this hipster's gallery, the lunatic painting with the wilting flowers and the crying clown, with his beautiful shining dress, a statement to all those Communist's and the government that wished to not listen to the ninety-nine percent.

The flowers, shining like bloody bullets, they grabbed Sonic's legs and ushered him further out of the womb, the place where he felt safe, into the outside world. The lady's uterus will thank them. Sonic was in development for over many years, and it was finally time for him to come out, with placenta all over him, the liquor of the siren's ready to lavish his tongue.

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…_

Further he went in his insanity, and the devils and bullets continued to usher him further, out of the blue cave and into the doctor's offices, a sea green welcomed him when they discovered that Sonic was a very special, very sick hedgehog.

No one cared about you unless you were sick, Sonic thought.

No one cared about you unless you had some sort of special illness.

Have Oliver Sachs research you…

…Realize that Blayze would've never been loved by him.

The insanity lingered, he could taste fairy's blood on his lips.

The dragons told him he couldn't have their gold.

The sea maidens rocked him to sleep with their gentle waves, gave him a warm mug of milk and a sleeping pill.

_Mr. Sonic, you must go to sleep now…_

_Mr. Sonic…_

_Give him an injection of Haldol…_

Spring withered away, and summer was just wuthering to its warmest night, and soon, would become cold again, scented with the smells of apple butter and cider.

The bullet petals had covered their faces, the placenta was stitched back in the womb, Sonic reentered inside, and the sea maidens told him it was all over now, he can go back to sleep. They had needles as large as his arm, and he could imagine thrusting the entire needlepoint into his asshole, just to get him to calm down, inebriated into his Elysium with his little magical fairies that told him that freedom was only one sleeping pill away, and an extra dose of Haldol.

Maybe some milk too, for some good luck.

He struggled against the vises of the Haldol. He wanted to talk to his brothers, ask them why they were so hostile, why they hated against their own skin and blood. Sonic had took care of Blayze! Sonic had loved the unborn child when he found out about him! They hated him, for simply being lucky, for being physically healthy when he was born, and his mother once was loving, as loving he was to her, when she ate her dinner of mashed food. Not at all appetizing, not at all like anything his mother once would eat.

He once mashed a hot dog for her to eat, straight from the gas station, just to give her happy memories of her alcoholic years. And some milk too, though Sonic knew she no longer had breasts.

She gurgled softly, as Sonic watched TV. His mother wasn't capable of much thought or even simple words, but in a rare display of affection even when she was alive and her brain was still intact, she held his hand.

He wished it never had to be this way.

_Dear My Death of Me,_

_I loved you. I still love you. And I will make you happy. I will make you happy by stopping this bloodline of insanity. First it was my grandma and grandpa. Then it was you. Then it was me. And I don't want the same to happen to Tails, even if he's not mine genetically._

_I want to let go of these memories. First, I must tell you the truth, of what really happened to you. To my doctors, to everyone else I lied to, and I thought they wouldn't care much further to hear the story._

_I bastardized myself, just so I can lie about what happened to you. You were cruelly mistreated. And I'm sorry for covering up the damage the mental health community has caused back in the '90s, back when autistics were regarded as cold, unfeeling robots, like they would've said about Blayze, and that schizophrenics had no future, no way of getting any better. This hospital still used lobotomy. I wasn't sure why. These people were just as sick as you are, thinking that stabbing someone in the brain would fix your disease._

_Belham never rolled with the program with stopping lobotomy and shock therapy. They said you were crazy, that you really needed it, and I thought it would help. I was young, about 10 years old, alright? You probably don't remember. I took care of Blayze at the time, and I really wasn't 15, I really wasn't really trying to get out of high school, for fuck's sake, I protected myself with that false memory, I was 10, and dad soon disappeared and last I heard, he had a heart attack and died. He died when I just got out of college (dropped out, possibly due to mental illness and my drunkenness). And mother, I tried to care for you! Doctors told me everything to do, like make sure you take your medication, swirl it around in pudding, crush and mash your food into a tube, and soon mother, you couldn't have sex anymore because you were this corpse that was alive but God knows you were closer to death than anything. Molested me? Maybe you did. I don't fucking remember. Father never said a word. I hated that bastard. His fingers were always gray and dirty and his breath smelled like cigars and he always read the newspaper and ignored you and me and he always read the police reports. Always fuckin' read them. "Hey, did you know that some guy…" I don't care! I'm glad he's gone. You though, I never could let go of you. You babied me when I was five years old, even though it was wrong, even if you touched those disgusting places of mine, I still loved you. I couldn't stop those feelings from coming up. I hated myself, but soon, you were just a blow-up doll for any man to come over and fuck you. I couldn't do anything. They told me they had business to take care of, and I was sure if I protested to them raping you, they would kill both of us, and now I feel like I raped you when I couldn't do anything to stop it. The unborn child I heard about too. That you were raped by another man, you had a child, and my father, he stabbed you and you had to go to the ER. He denied the whole thing happened and the doctors looked at your file, saw you were schizoaffective, and they…_

…_didn't believe that you were being abused. They just thought you made the whole damn thing up._

_I loved you. I felt bad for you. I felt responsible for your death._

_Then I had to kill you. It was euthanasia. I still didn't want to do it. But I did._

_I made you choke on your food. You puked, and you choked on your puke. And I sat back and watched. I let you die. I called 911, and I was very disturbed by the whole situation. They said I was insane, and I wasn't responsible for your death. But I knew I was. You know how big of a punishment it is here for assisted suicide. I swore I did it for you._

The needle was loosening in his grip. His lids were heavy, and the letters appeared slanted and archaic. He expected the bullet flowers to take him away from the desk and outside of the mother's womb, but they waded away, the pool of Haldol in his blood dissolving them.

_What will they do now that they know?_

_I'll go to jail. I'm sure I can't have a slap on the wrist and a warning. I was sane when I did it. What do I tell Shadow? What do I tell him that I'm a murderer?_

_I couldn't let go of her life because…_

…_I was responsible for her death._

The needle slipped from his fingertips. He slept with tears in his eyes. The moon waned on them, making them appear a cornflower-blue.

—

No one seemed to notice the letter on Sonic's desk. No one seemed to care. And Sonic's truth was unspoken.

The womb was shut, the morning reflected on the panes of the windows, to convince them that it was light, and not at all a dark moment in their lives. The sun bled in his vision, it screamed as it birthed yet another galaxy and devoured another one, and Sonic simply held his silver spoon prominently in the new galaxy's mouth, feeding it peas and carrots. Mother's favorite meal.

Shadow returned, the sky glazed with orange liquor, and Shadow held the dress again, telling him of the great things his child had done.

"It gave that little girl hope."

"It helped our business. Everyone liked seeing you in that cute dress."

"And of course, I thought you were…"

Sonic glanced in his eyes. There was honesty. There was appreciation. The letter still appeared blue in the grotto of the woman's sorrow, and oh Shadow! If only he could tell you the horrible things he did! The things he did to murder his mother, to make sure his brother had a good life before his mother allegedly murdered him, the sun stared at him, about to place him underneath her glowing gown that brightened one half of the world, and he was calm, for a moment, when Shadow told him.

"I thought you looked…cute in it too. Maybe you should wear it more often. You make people smile in it."

He never really made anyone smile. He was often told he was too negative, a drunkard, selfish, and many other things, but Shadow told him of that love he had in his heart for him. He could feel it hurting inside him, and he wanted to nurse it, the child, the infant it was…

"I know you're sick."

Sonic nodded. He could hear the nurses telling him to put his food away, but he truly was hungry, but he was hungrier for Shadow's love, and he wanted to swallow so much of it he would choke. Like mother. The vomit was his love for her, and he hated himself for even believing his love had killed her.

"But I want to help you. I don't know how long you'll be in this hospital. What did they say on how long you needed to be here?"

Shrugging, with the mashed potatoes affixed to his tongue, he said, "Maybe a month or two. I was here for maybe…" He swallowed, the lump of clouds sinking inside him. "A year. But that was…years ago. I'm sure this place is different now. But hey, they lobotomized my mother here that many years ago too, so I'm not sure."

"They…what?"

"Lobotomized her. Drove a stake through her brain. Soon she couldn't eat by herself. I had mash her food in a tube and inject it inside her. That's what they did to me for a while cause I refused to eat I guess. These people are bastards and will just hurt you, my friend. I don't know why the police took me here. Buffalo Behavioral Health is a better damn place than here. Belham is for sociopaths and real crazies like me. Everyone just…pisses themselves and eats cold food and meanwhile I see black widows near their cooking supplies and think someone is going to die. And hear people telling me that my apartment is up for rent and anyone can come in any time they want to look around, and then these people…with their fucking baby, you know? The baby cries, all night long, and I can't get to sleep. It reminds me of Blayze and I hate it."

He eyed the desk with his carved note to his mother. He wanted Shadow to glance at it, realize that there were false memories and real memories, and he couldn't tell them apart. He wanted these memories to be real, that he was a good person and had hated his mother and was never responsible for her death. The needles struck his eyes, the pain throbbing in his lids, and he looked back at Shadow, the nurse taking away his dish. So much for cold food.

"You never told me you had a baby brother, Sonic."

"Yeah, and he's dead. My mother probably killed him, but we're not sure. He could've had SIDS. No one knows. My mother couldn't tell me. She never got charged. Because you know, by the time anyone had any suspicion she basically became a vegetable. So they didn't think it was her at all."

"Is this true, or is it…"

He was warned of Sonic's delusions, his rantings about memories that weren't real. Shadow remembered that he heard doctor reports that he rambled about how he met his baby brothers and they planned on killing him with bullets and drowning him inside some kind of fetal juice. Whatever he could've meant. Sonic rubbed his sore ass, the Haldol being injected just hours ago, and drool escaped from his lips. The nurses surrounded him, like a geriatric about to die on the plains of medication and piss-smelling dayrooms, and they told Shadow that it was time for him to leave, as after all, Sonic was about to take his medication. Insert Seroquel XR inside his banana pudding, and he would sleep like a geriatric shot by his family because he could've had rabies. He rolled around in his grave, smiled with his banana pudding-rotted teeth, and he waited for the worms to come, to decompose him, to vilify him, to make him go to Hell after he killed his mother.

The carved letter to his mother still remained unread by anyone in the hospital.

Was it really a real letter, or was it some kind of guilty fantasy, bred by both the true and false memories?

He rubbed his fingers against the letters in the desk. They felt real. But so did the black widow that crawled from the ceiling into his bed, biting him and sending him to another deep sleep. The afternoon rolled away, and it was night, the activity hour where they watched old Batman movies and sometimes Fried Green Tomatoes for the women.

_And now get a mirror and look at your vaginas…_

He remembered he once choked on his mother's vagina (possibly) and he screamed, the women pissing themselves in fear.

—

The letters still were real to him. So was the inevitably of being in the hospital for a long time, the womb that captured him, the lips of the siren's always asking him to drink their milk. They gave out cartons every few hours, telling him he needed his calcium. The lady tried to smoke a cigarette again, and was put in seclusion. She smeared shit all over the walls, cause she was callous, and heinous.

He thought everyone pissed themselves because they put too much nutrients in the juice. They added pills to the mix of orange and lemon juice. And it was why everyone was sleepy upon drinking it. There was a tea dispenser, and he decided to have some tea instead. He scalded his tongue on it, and they believed he tried to hurt himself.

"What do we do about that hedgehog?"

"He drools on himself, he rambles, and lately he's been writing strange songs about dead infants. He's been reading books that seem inappropriate for this place too…no one should be allowed to read Anne Sexton and the Xanth series. No one can read in here. It can hurt their fragile minds."

"Yes, only Time magazine! Only articles that are educational!"

Sonic could hear them across the hallway, but they pretended he was deaf. They believed he didn't had a real functioning mind anymore. He was just like his mother. Brain dead, drooling, and incompetent.

Sonic read science fiction and poetry books given by Shadow, but the hospital staff took them away, calling it "filth" and "a weapon against recovery". So the books were often contraband, and he remembered he once lost a book and the hospital never gave it back. They believed he tried to hurt himself with it, razorblades stuck to the pages, and Sonic said nothing, only shrunk in defeat.

"And you know those Kilgore Trout books he reads too? Disgusting! They have naked women on the cover, and they can be bought at porn stores! Why would he read such a degenerate man!"

Sonic once wrote to Kilgore Trout asking for him to sign his copy of his book, but he later learned that he was dead, kaput, gone, and so it goes, a writer who wasn't known anywhere but to him.

The letters on the desk still felt real, including the bullet flowers that dazzled in the window in the ocean of the sky, telling him, that there must be a way to recover, a way to get out of this wretched mother of memories and into the loving arms of the hedgehog who loved him since he first saw him.

He looked down. Depression oozed into his brain. He felt he wasn't worthy at all of his love.

"But I do," Shadow said.

The Haldol made his emotions stunted, blunted, and the nurses coaxed him into his room, where they saw the desk, but the words were still unread, and they still never cared about his struggles, despite being inside a mental hospital that smelled of rotten food and urine coated the walls like paint.

The nurses talked and chattered and laughed, expecting that Sonic was as dead as a vegetable. The hallway laughed about his prospects, being in the hospital for as long as a year or so. His son dying because he was dying himself. The night wards even laughed that they could shove food down his throat and he would choke, he would choke on his own vomit, and he would mercifully kill him, just like he did to his mother.

"Did you read that shit? What he wrote, on this desk, that shit about his mother and his family and all that? Do you expect to believe that? We saw on his records that his mother was here, and we didn't lobotomized her. We just gave her some medication. And she never took them. And she drank. The motherfucker believes he's a murderer. Believe that shit? Believe that shit? Believe that…"

He heard a cranky, screeching voice in his head, sounding like a strangled macaw wishing to voice out its final vocalization.

_Kill him._

His claws grew, became as giant as planets, his jaws became worthy of odontophobics' fear, he became the monster that grew from the walls from his anxieties, his fears and his pain, and he choked the night aide until he gasped on his own vomit, and God how the night danced with the crazies! The lycanthropes howled, the women who had post-traumatic stress dreams screamed and pissed the bed, the pyromaniacs were sent to seclusion and also pissed that room, and the night howled, bloody and manic, the nurses grabbing their long steel needle full of a combination of several other medicines. He somehow grew resistant to the Haldol they said. The Seroquel doesn't do much good anymore…How could this beast, this tyrant, manage to wake up from his slumber, his cocktail mix of Haldol and Thorazine and Seroquel?

The claws raked at the man's neck, red marks searing like flames upon his white arctic skin. The nurses gathered around, shoved their breasts against him, asking him to drink their milk, drink the medicine that would send him to sleep.

_Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…Mother wants to say a word about you. She says that she never abused you._

Bullshit, he replied.

_She never made you drink her breast milk, she never made you eat her crotch…she says you're disgusting. And that's why you're here. You're very sick. Very ill. And you're going to be damned inside her womb. You're going to be damned like her other babies, her other bottles of alcohol she loved like her babies, and her husband who fell to her curse. The silent curse made him not contact 911, he never went and admitted he had problems with his heart, with lung cancer from all of his cigars. The curse still went on, until you said you loved her. But you never did, Sonic._

Love us instead, they whined.

The false memories ached in his head. He could hear the womb opening, the Mother of All of the Sick Infants moaning, and he heard sighs, groans of the Earth! The sky broke open, rain let loose, the woman screamed, and blood drained from the man who said that his sadness wasn't believable, the desk that once was scrawled on with his secrets, the letters burned by the hellfires from the Mother's righteousness, her utter belief that Sonic would be damned.

The false memories…the false memories…

**(A/N: These parts messed with the text to give the illusion that the voices speaking in Sonic's head were very loud and bold. This site doesn't give you that option, so you can only imagine that the voices are speaking louder than an air horn and static on a surround-sound TV.)**

THEY AREN'T REAL.

That was why they were called false.

I know you don't want to hear me out…

Whatever has made you sick, will eventually destroy you in the end. And you are nothing but a sick man who will lie in the dirt, waiting for the worms to come, you piece of shit.

The voices grew louder, until eventually, the letters in this chapter filled many pages.

I AM YOUR MOTHER AND YOU WILL SPEAK TO ME RIGHT NOW, SONIC. YOU ARE TERRIBLE FOR KILLING ME. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE A HORRIBLE, TRAGIC DEATH THAT NO ONE WILL MOURN. LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET, EXCEPT TO IGNORANT TEENAGERS EVERYWHERE WHO DON'T REALIZE THAT THE STORY WAS ALL ABOUT HOW TWO TEENS COULDN'T EXPERIENCE LOVE BECAUSE THEIR FAMILIES WERE SO DISTRUSTING. DISGUSTING HEINOUS PEOPLE, JUST LIKE YOU. JUST LIKE YOU…

DON'T LISTEN TO THE BITCH.

The sirens collected his blood. They piled him up on the shock therapy table. The room was dark, colored with chalk and blood and shit. The door shut with a mighty roar, made of real tin and metal. The doctors didn't care about him screaming. They didn't. They didn't.

I don't need shock therapy, he said.

I'm perfectly fine my mother is speaking to me she loves me she loves me…

Shadow.

The letter on the desk still remained, Shadow tracing his fingers on it, like he was blind and learning to read Braille.

"So this is what happened…"

THEY'RE GOING TO SHOCK ME SHADOW HELP

"This is what happened and this is why you don't…trust these people. But what are we going to do about…"

THEY'RE GOING TO SHOCK ME AND YOU'RE JUST SITTING THERE THINKING ABOUT LIFE THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING HOW ABOUT YOU EAT SOME GODDAMN FISH AND MAKE MY BRAIN BETTER WOOOOOO-WEEEEE WOOOOOOO-WEEEE MAKE THE MERRY-GO-ROUND FULL OF MURDER AND CORPSES I'LL PLAY IN THEIR INTESTINES

"Sonic killed his mother," he said. And the entire hospital listened.

The womb had blood flowing through her, but soon, the entire hospital, that once was a nice shade of cornflower blue, began to be white and yellow and green, like most hospitals were supposed to be.

"Now this can be like a regular formatted story," said God. He was alive again. Somehow. After Jesus had killed Him.

"But you were responsible for her lobotomy. You made Sonic kill her. You made him feel bad for her and you gave him the desire to want to kill her. You are trying to heal these sick people when you exacerbated their illnesses in the first place!"

Sonic glanced at his blue scrubs, smelling the scent, also, of piss and vomit, along with some blood.

"Sonic is seriously ill, Shadow. He's ill, and we have to fix him, we have to make sure he's okay to come out…"

"He's ill, yes," he said. "But you forget that you aren't supposed to psychically damage your patients so they never want to be ill again. This hospital…it was all a lie. It isn't a hospital, but rather a hellhouse. I see monsters crawling through the walls, I see the nurses with large breasts begging for Sonic to suck on them so he would be lost here forever. I see that you're nothing but monsters that only want the money. Sonic has no money. He worked for me and spent all his money on booze and his sick son with a disease that can only be cured by money and insurance."

The Haldol was coming in full effect, and his vision was blurred, torn apart by stars. Was everything he imagined the hospital to be…true? Was Shadow simply covering up for him somehow?

The desk seemed to fade away, a tide in Coney Island along with all the trash, the blue broken bottles and the seagreen beers, but he wasn't sure what the concoction was to Shadow stating that he saw what he saw. Shadow didn't want to be here. He didn't want to see the things he saw in this hospital. The monsters weren't always so benevolent. And neither was the Mother behind the womb.

"Seeing what Sonic sees, I can tell that he doesn't enjoy being here. He's not recovering. As a matter of fact, he's regressing. And you think he's getting better. Unable to read his shitty Kilgore Trout he brought a few times to my business, unable to drink coffee full of caffeine like mine, you are making him ill, and I want Sonic out of here tomorrow. I'm going to put him in that wellness center right beside you. He had good memories being there, and the doctors probably cared about him. But you're sick, heinous, spontaneous, wicked and nothing but an invective coming from a dung beetle…"

He couldn't hear the rest of his words. Static buzzed in his ears, the television set being turned on to nothing but white and black fuzz, the man saying that it was the most important channel in the world and that it told him lies.

Sonic heard things from the static, and had listened to their careful words.

_This is all not real…_

_You're faking being sick! It's all a derelict daydream!_

_Being sick is the only way for anyone to care about you…_

His hands were stained with blood, and he somewhat remembered what happened. The man in the white suit, grovelling on the floor was a blood stain in his neck, the nurses examining him, giving him care. More care than he ever received.

He was scrambled. His brain was fried, sunny side-up, and poached. Sonic wished to tell a nurse that he felt like dying, that he never wanted to be alive again, he didn't understand why anyone was alive and why anyone didn't want to be dead.

These stories were written on the wall, and he woke up, with the doctors and nurses reading them, enjoying his lyrical prowess. They told him that writing songs was the only way he could recover, and that his imaginations and delusions would soon fade away.

He was given Invega in his cocktail of medications now. Along with lithium and Paxil. He claimed the hallucinations stopped sometimes. It was all he could hope for.

The false memories still seemed abstract, a Picasso painting sliced together like the fried egg, the pan lined up with brown burnt edges…Had Picasso ever tried to make a painting using eggs? No, he never did. Sonic wasn't sure why he still had these thoughts. _It was all a recovery process, all a recovery process…_

He wanted to take them apart, make something new with the memories.

Make a story, make a song, make a lyric. He wasn't entirely sure. But the insanity he felt in the womb, it felt true, and he still heard static in his ears, he still heard his mother, he still thought of Shadow, wanting to see what he saw, and wanting to make the sacrifice to have a schizophrenic brain with his brain full of intelligence and verbal knowledge, as he wrote his novel, claiming he was close to completing it.

_Am I in it? Sonic asked._

_No, but you were an inspiration. And this hospital was an inspiration too. It's about a man who once believed in magic and faeries and dragons until he's sent to a hospital, and all the magic is sapped away from his life…_

He took his pills, packed his bags, and Shadow waited for him, glimpsing at the hospital room full of confessions and the lunatic ramblings of someone who still was inside a hospital that gave LSD to their patients.

It was shut down shortly after that.

Sonic still wondered if the hospital trip was a thing that happened, or it also was a false memory.

"It was real," Shadow said, holding onto Sonic's hand tightly, smiling widely, while Sonic's child was displayed by the child who asked if they could go to the beach together, just the two of them.

"Were…the memories real about my mother? I…can't face that I…that I…"

The cafe much more artistic, with its chairs that looked to be made of real jewels and ivory, the walls that were clean, not at all crawling with monsters, the aquamarine and the brown still greeting him, along with all the pictures of the artists and writings greeting him with their wide-toothed smiles and grimaces.

"They could be real. But…I just don't know what I'm going to do with the possibility that it was real, Sonic. Assisted suicide, well, it is a pretty big deal, but…"

He wished he never had to see another side dish of peas and carrots again, of mashed potatoes, of limp meat.

"If you were right and that hospital…really did that to her in the '90s when they didn't even do lobotomies anymore…" He tried to laugh about it, thinking how ridiculous the hospital was, for still giving LSD to the patients, something that they've done in the '70s in some hospitals, and he believed some kind of evil magic was behind it. A man who wanted these people to be so damaged, possibly for money, maybe he was damaged himself, or maybe it all was a social experiment. To see how mad these patients possibly could be.

Despite the futuristic look of the hospital, with the sliding doors and the windows that weren't criss-crossed with black lines, the hospital had very little funds, and kept their patients there for years. The only way to suck money from them like a parasite. A louse that continued sucking at Sonic's blood.

"You're going to a rehab center soon," Shadow said, the grip on his hand tighter, firm, their eyes meeting, the manic wide pupils that Shadow once saw slowly eviscerating from his gaze. "You need help. But I thought you could perform a couple songs for this cafe before you go. Have a nice cup of hot coffee. See Rosie again, take her to the beach. And I'm sure we'll meet again, Sonic. I guess for once when I appeared sympathetic towards someone, it…"

He could catch a slight hint of a blush on Shadow. He never expected him to express his feelings towards him like this before. He poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, Sonic expecting to taste like diabetic piss.

"Maybe my dad was right, when he actually was sober, that you should help those that…Well, you know what I mean, Sonic. You reminded me a lot of my father. And I wanted to make sure your life was a lot better. Cause I couldn't let go the memories of him too. He…wasn't a bad man. Just…misguided. Like you."

The cup didn't at all hurt his gauzed hand. Somehow, his wounds seemed to disappear, with the love of Shadow, and maybe for once, he began to believe there could've been faeries and magic in this coffeeshop after all, especially with the little girl who now seemed to walk with elvish ears, wearing seashells in her sandy blonde hair, her blue eyes as deep and as cornflower blue as the ocean…

Sonic tasted the coffee with a hesitant sip, and he smiled, for the first time in a long time. It was the best tasting coffee he ever had.


End file.
